The point is that always adding semicolons does not solve the weirdness problem. Consider:

    return
         17

This returns undefined, which is counter-intuitive if you come from other c-style syntax languages. But if you say "always terminate statements with a semicolons, otherwise weirdness happens", the intuitive fix is:

    return
        17;

Which still doesn't solve the problem. You have to remember an additional rule: "Don't insert line breaks in the middle of a statement, if the line break could be interpreted as a statement terminator." Or to put it another way: If you are in doubt, don't use a line break.

The problem isn't really if statements should be terminated with a semicolon or not. The problem is to decide when it is safe to insert a line break when it is not intended to terminate the statement.

Whoever linebreaks return statements like that deserves what's coming to them.

But I get what you're saying. Simple, consistent rules are better for teamwork.

I do that sometimes (obviously not in JavaScript), to split up long lines in situations such as this:

  bool is_foo_possible() {
    return
      test_first_condition() &&
      test_second_contition() &&
      test_third_condition()
  }

I don't think that's very horrible.

I would tend to write that:

  bool is_foo_possible() {
    return test_first_condition()
      && test_second_contition()
      && test_third_condition()
  }

I prefer to put my infix operators at the beginning of continuation lines, because that makes it immediately clear from a glance that it's a continuation line.

I do this as well.

For a while, I tried to stick to the rule that "return\n" was not allowed. When I meant to return undefined, I'd write "return undefined".

In the end, I abandoned that rule, because too many of my functions return undefined. But it's kind of a nice thing. When I do get around to building that linter, I might make `return\s*\n` verboten.

You could just write "return;", that would make it obvious that no value is returned.

OH. Good point.

He used to work at Yahoo. That's where I met him and while I never worked on a team with him, he seemed like a nice guy. Definitely smart, though his blog/writing style may come across as arrogant to some. I would have loved to end up on a team with him as I'm sure I could have learned a lot from him.

Thanks :)