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.

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