It should be clear, particularly from the last rule outlined above, that we don’t need to be following a semicolon-free coding style to fall foul of JavaScript’s ASI feature. Perfectly innocent line breaking can lead to semicolons being inserted into our token stream without our permissions so it’s important to be aware of the kinds of situations where this can happen. Much of the recent debate about semicolons misses this point. Additionally, love or hate ASI, it’s with us and is not going away so perhaps it would be more productive to embrace it as a feature and use it where it suits us and work around it where it doesn’t.

Regardless of your preference, ASI and other obscure rules in non-trivial languages such as JavaScript mean that our build tools should involve some kind of syntax checking mechanism. Strongly-typed languages such as Java have sophisticated editors that can understand the intent of your code and provide real-time feedback as you type.