Wow, that snuck up on me a lot faster than I expected. So, I guess I should probably answer my most asked question. No, no, not that question, the other most asked question. Yes, why I don't use semicolons. In order to tell this story, I need to go back in time a little bit, back to when tabs versus spaces was a huge deal. Everybody was all worried about do you use tabs, do you use spaces, and we realized it's the most pointless argument in the entire world. And as text editors became more advanced, it became pretty much easy to switch from tabs and spaces, automatically convert tabs to spaces, and so on. So, there's really no worry about using tabs or spaces because it didn't really make any difference since your text editor could convert anything with tabs to spaces or anything into spaces with tabs. It really didn't matter at all. But for some reason, this idea of semicolons still permeates the community, and whenever someone sees me not using semicolons, I get tons of hate in the comments about how

oh, this tutorial was so good, except for you didn't use semicolons, so it was trash, and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I've heard it millions of times, I swear, and I always wonder, like, why do people get so upset that I don't use semicolons? What is it that they think that I'm missing? And I've asked some people and tried to figure out, like, why do you hate that I don't use semicolons so much? And some people just say they hate it, they want semicolons, it makes more sense, it's more structured. And to them, I say, Okay, that's great, that makes sense. You do what works best for you, I'll do what works best for me, and there's really nothing to worry about there. But other people tell me that it's a bad practice, it's a terrible thing, and that I shouldn't be teaching people to not use semicolons. And to them, I say that I think you're a little bit misled. Now, the one thing most people

mention when they say that semicolons are a must is immediately invoked function expressions, essentially a function that immediately calls itself. So, if we just create a function called test, and we're just going to say that test does stuff and immediately invoked a function expression. Essentially, when you wrap this inside parentheses and then call it immediately, you're just calling this function immediately and scoping everything inside of it. The reason a lot of people say that this is the reason that semicolons are important is because if you don't have a semicolon on the line above this, it's going to cause you some weird problems. But I use an extension called Prettier to actually auto-format my code for me. So, when I save, you'll notice the semicolon is automatically inserted before this immediately invoked function expression to fix any of those errors of the problem that I was talking about. And to demonstrate what that problem is, if I take this and I put this code down here at the very bottom and I save, you're going to notice I'm

actually going to get some errors when I save. You notice my code doesn't create one as I expect, and you can see that my formatting is all messed up. And that's because these parentheses essentially make JavaScript think that I'm trying to call a function on the code that came before it. And since I don't have a semicolon here, JavaScript doesn't know that these are two separate lines of code, and it tries to smush them all together as one line of code when it runs. But you'll notice when I saved this file with Prettier, Prettier formatted my code in a way that it made it very obvious to me exactly why there's an error because it did not format my code as I expect. So, I know that I need some type of semicolon here. And now when I save, you can see it properly auto-formats my code, puts the semicolon at the front for me just like I expect. So, in the very, very rare instance where I write code that could cause bugs because I don't have a semicolon, Prettier is going to

take that code, auto-format it in a way that makes it obvious to me that there is an error because of the fact that I didn't put a semicolon. But I don't run into this problem almost ever. I'd say maybe once a month at most I run into this problem because the code I wrote generally doesn't use things like this that would cause these types of problems to incur. And even when they do, like I said, Prettier does this for me. I put a semicolon, hit save again, and now my problem is solved. It literally took me less than a second to solve the issue. Now, there are a few instances where Prettier is not actually going to fix the problem for me, and in those instances, almost always, the text editor is going to throw an error telling me exactly what the problem is, so I know where to put my semicolon. Or I'm going to have the text editor automatically reformat due to using Prettier, and I'm going to see immediately that JavaScript thinks

something's going on that I don't want it to, and I can put in the semicolon where I actually need it, but 99.9% of the time, it's nothing that I ever have to worry about, and it never ever really affects me at all. So, why would I do it though? Because it looks like there's like no downside for the most part, but there may be a potential downside of not using semicolons, while using them just has no downside at all. And the main reason I don't use them is I just don't like using them. It's an extra character that I need to type. It's a lot of extra mental effort for me to keep track of if I have a semicolon at the end of the line, and if I want to add stuff to the end of the line, I have to make sure it's before the semicolon. It's just kind of a pain, and I'm used to using programming languages that don't use semicolons. I used to write a lot of C and Java, and

Back then, I would put semicolons at the end of all of my JavaScript lines. But then, I moved on, and I started writing a lot of code in Ruby, and Ruby doesn't have semicolons. So, I just got used to not using them. And then, when I started writing JavaScript code, I also just didn't use the semicolons because you don't need to. It's optional. So, I just wouldn't put them in there, and I just got used to programming that way. Now, I have nothing at all against people that use semicolons or don't use them. I've even worked on projects myself where semicolons were part of the actual formatting that they wanted to use on that project. So, I used them just fine. The important thing to realize is that you just want to set up some type of consistent styling that everybody on the same project uses. Set up some type of prettier config or eslint config that is going to automatically format files for you. Once you have that, you never again have to worry about semicolons because if you

don't like them, just don't put them in there, and then when you save, prettier will automatically add them in for you if that's how your printer config is set up. Or if you really like semicolons, you can put them all in there like you're used to, and then when you save, prettier is going to remove them all when they're not actually needed if that's the way your config is set up. That's the great thing about using these automatic formatting tools, because you can write your code exactly like you want, and as soon as you save, it's going to format it in the way that everybody in the project agreed is the best for that code. Really, the moral of the story is to use whatever styling you like, just make sure it's consistent across the entire project, whether that's semicolons or no semicolons. It doesn't matter. I personally don't use semicolons because it's what I'm used to, but you do you. And with that said, I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you did

check out other videos linked over here. Subscribe to the channel for more videos like this, and thank you very much for watching.

Why I Don't Use Semicolons In JavaScript

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