TIL about the greek question mark

Tell me, can you tell the difference between these two characters?

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

EtzBetz
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501Y

Laughs in just removing all semicolons because it’s not necessary in JS.

Great, now you just need to do the rest of the code.

Andrew
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51Y

It is recommended. But in TS it is not necessary with rare exceptions.

I wouldn’t do it without an auto formatter. With prettier it will catch potential no semi colon issues.

I tried prettier and I thought it was literally making my code uglier. It’s eslint --fix for me.

Andrew
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11Y

You absolutely have to use prettier with JS. I don’t think there is auto adding missing semicolons in C/C++ though, it would be very useful.

EtzBetz
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1Y

Yes, true. I also did setup so that any missing semicolon will be added, because I got sick of not inserting them sometimes and then some code was without them and some was. (Before I tested just leaving them all out, out of fun, so I got into the habit of just leaving them out regularly)

thanks to eslint enforcing it in the default rules it’s necessary for most typescript projects

Nato Boram
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41Y

Except that you should use Prettier for formatting instead of ESLint. That said, semicolons are useless noise

Why should you use that?

@fidodo@lemm.ee
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It adds even more auto formatting rules so you can basically stop thinking about formatting entirely. I used to be opinionated about formatting but now I just go with whatever prettier does. It’s not always the best but it’s consistent and it’s a big chunk of my brain I can free up for things that matter. It also formats things safely so you don’t run into those weird edge cases where semicolons matter if you choose to turn them off.

Aren’t some of the scenarios for needing a semicolon logical-domain problems and not syntax issues? I wouldn’t trust autoformatting to spot a logical problem, though I also hope no one is writing code that flippantly. (as if honest mistakes aren’t common enough!)

Maybe there’s some edge case but in my years of using prettier I haven’t encountered one once.

Andrew
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11Y

Never used eslint. prettier is a must. semicolons are only needed to split some rare TS syntax lines.

Platypus
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That’s what’s really irks me be about JS–you can do just about whatever but you’re not supposed to.

It’s an imperative language, but best practices are to use it functionally.

You can omit semicolons, but best practices are to use them.

You can use sloppy equality, but best practices are to always use strict.

After switching to typescript with linting and prettier I simply hate writing vanilla JavaScript anymore. Some people complain about the extra project setup needed but I find that time pays for itself immediately.

Andrew
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01Y

Extra project setup like pnpm add -D typescript && tsc --init? One thing that is kinda annoying is that you have to manage were will js files go.

And eslint and setting up tsconfig for your project structure.

Andrew
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You don’t need eslint with TS.

Why do the typescript extensions to eslint exist then?

Andrew
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I don’t know. I never used eslint, therefore it is not needed. Everything works perfectly fine without it.

Why do you need it?

JavaScript reminds me of an older brother who happens to be the most laid back stoner you could meet. “Like yea man, you should probably use semicolons, but I ain’t gonna narc”

You need to remember that a lot of those best practices are to cover for the performance issues from misusing loosely typed variables.

The JavaScript engine can compile clean, type-safe code down to be almost as fast as properly compiled code. When you use various features like the loose equals or various object mutations and the like, the engine cannot optimize it, leaving your code much, much slower.

I’ll add that to my mountain of reasons for using typescript

Yup! I love TypeScript, and I love the flexibility of JavaScript. With all of the type templates and generics and other black magic TypeScript has, it’s pretty easy to even support the crazy stuff like mixins and contextual parameters (if I’m not speaking too loosely while avoiding proper terms!).

A lot of the crazy stuff won’t optimize, but at least it goes to show how it’s not really tying JavaScript’s hands even when requiring TS everywhere.

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