This comment was originally written by jon.js1.smi...@gmail.com

I'm fairly certain that most programmers who work with those languages (Go, JS) on a daily basis are aware of the "pitfalls" of ASI. I personally don't see these as pitfalls, since the grammar is quite clear and unambiguous about why "return\n foo" does what it does-- and if you acknowledge that a newline is a line ending like a semicolon is, it should really not be surprising at all. But I suppose this is ultimately what is up for debate.

That said, I don't see this as a reason in itself to be against ASI. It's important to realize that while forced semi colons are "familiar to many programmers", many programmers (I would say an extremely large population in this context, since we're primarily including the JS community here) are also very much familiar with ASI and optional semi colons. They aren't a new concept, and they are used in many languages-- JS and Go were named, but there are other languages that implement this in varying capacities too, like Scala, Ruby, Smalltalk. I'm not sure these other programmers appreciate being shunned in favor of treating the C*/Java users like first class citizens here, that seems to be what is happening.

Finally, I just want to say that I don't think we need to argue readability of programs with optional semicolons. If you've spent any amount of time writing programs in a language with optional semicolons, you likely understand why this is such an important point for many of the users coming from those languages. The reduction of semicolon noise is extremely significant, especially in a scripted world where lines are typically shorter than they are long. It's unfortunate to have to talk in terms of aesthetic choice when adopting a language, but aesthetics remains a reality in adoption, and I'd bet most newcomers from ASI-supporting languages would see this as quite a hurdle to proper adoption and acceptance of Dart as the future of the web. You're effectively telling all these JS programmers that the way they've been coding for years was outright wrong, and they are sitting there scratching their heads, because their code worked just fine-- and looked cleaner, too.

Get rid of syntactic noise aka semicolons #34

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