The syntax of a language is the poetry form, it defines things like meter, scansion, rhyming scheme. Of course people are going to have strong aesthetic opinions on it, just as there are centuries of arguments in poetry over what form is best. You can make great programs in any language, just like you make beautiful poetry in almost every form. (Leaving an almost there for people that dislike Limericks, I suppose.) Language choice is one of the (sometimes too few) creative choices we can make in any project.

> Another option is to do something like automatic semicolon insertion (ASI) based on a set of rules. Unfortunately, a lot of people’s first experience with this kind of approach is JavaScript and its really poor implementation of it, which means people usually just write semicolons regardless to remove the possible mistakes.

Though the joke is that the largest ASI-related mistakes in JavaScript aren't solved by adding more semicolons, it's the places that the language adds semicolons you didn't expect that trip you up the worst. The single biggest mistake is adding a newline after the `return` keyword and before the return value accidentally making a `return undefined` rather than the return value.

In general JS is actually a lot closer to the Lua example than a lot of people want to believe. There's really only one ASI-related rule that needs to be remembered when dropping semicolons in JS (and it is a lot like that Lua rule of thumb), the Winky Frown rule: if a line starts with a frown it must wink. ;( ;[ ;`

(It has a silly name because it keeps it easy to remember.)