I'd rather consistently have semicolons at the ends of lines than crap like this:

    ;(x || y).doSomething()
    ;[a, b, c].forEach(doSomething)

I'm also not a fan of the "comma-first" style, especially for var declarations...

    var foo
      , bar
      , baz
      ;

    var foo;
    var bar;
    var baz;

    var foo,
        bar,
        baz;

If you really hate the syntax quirks of javascript like me, a better solution is to just preprocess it. CoffeeScript has made me really enjoy writing frontend ui code again. http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

Typically I omit them if I can. And I have no reason to do so other than I think it makes the code look cleaner (I am often quite zealous on proper indentation / return lines).

I figure if using them works for you, rock on. If you hate them and don't use them, rock on. I really don't get bothered by debugging others' code either way as long as it is "readable-formatted" and works.

I've found that usually you fall into a situation where you have a company standard and have no choice in the matter though, and it doesn't even make a crap what your personal preference is.

Edit: To be fair though I only got "Eagle" on the test, but I chalk that up to only giving the test about 5 minutes of my time, too.

    function x() {
       return 
    	   2+3;
    }
    alert(x());

    syntax match javascriptReturnError /return\s*\n\r\?\s*\w.*$/

    ...

    highlight link javascriptReturnError Error

Edit: ninja’d by railsjedi: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1762677

Just because you don't wear pants at home doesn't mean you're not going to feel silly showing up at work without them.

Here are some: http://gist.github.com/612814

Edit: Er, tried to paste code in-line but formatting got messed up.

C programmers have always used semicolons and never wasted a second thinking whether they should.

And, as one who primarily writes in Python and Ruby, I always find myself omitting them, and spending more than a second wondering why they're necessary.

e.g., print somevar, othervar; exit()

    SyntaxError: not a chance!

javascript - var - ';' - '{' - '}' | s/function/def/ ~= python

Same for coding conventions. Want me to use camel casing for global variables even though I think it's hideous? Fine. Want me to put closing parenthesis on a newline by themselves on a multiline function call and I put it at the end of the last line? Find something better to do with your time.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough JavaScript to know where this falls.

MyObj.item.childItem.getAll()[0].properties... // etc.

It's common to want to split this over several lines. I am in favour of placing the the period at the end of the line to indicate that the expression continues. Other people prefer the dot to start the next line instead. I don't like the latter since the first line then looks like a mistakenly omitted semi-colon.

It is customary to stack operators by indenting.

Why are lines without semi-colons at the end bad?

This "feature" is really just a bad idea. I would hope that it gets thrown out in future versions of the standard (is there one?), and use semicolons in the meantime.

Example of what I mean:

- "Do a, b, c, ..." vs - "Do a ,b ,c ,..."

This is how it is, now use your time to understand the bigger structure, not punctuation.