Thank you. I still have this argument with people today. I think it's laziness for many devs. ASI is an _error correction mechanism_ that Eich added because there was no compile step in JS in 1995. It helped people ship code without having to spend forever tracking down missed semicolons or worry about getting bit by one in an undertested code path. It is part of the language. If you hate semicolons that much, go write VB/Ruby/Python...