Very strongly agreed. Syntactically significant whitespace is the source of so many preventable errors that I believe it's simply not worth the aesthetic improvements.
Keep in mind that I am being simultaneously irreverent while also expressing how I feel about these two debates (semicolons and significant whitespace).
I'm someone who has worked in a large variety of languages, including Python (significant whitespace) and Javascript (no significant whitespace).
First: semicolon inference in Javascript is an abomination :). If the language says that whitespace is not significant, then using newlines to infer where semicolons maybe should be... is inconsistent with the statement "whitespace is insignificant".
Second: when I learned Python, I was coming from a primarily Perl and C background. The significant whitespace wasn't a big deal at all because that's how I indent my code anyway. And I would argue (and do in code reviews) that any code that is not indented properly is incorrect because it is extraordinarily misleading to a reader.
So, yeah, for any given programming language, I couldn't care less if whitespace is significant or not, or whether there's semicolons at the end of lines, but god damnit don't go half way on either of those. Indent your code as if whitespace is significant (because it IS to whoever's trying to decipher it later), and stick semicolons at the end of your lines whether or not some stupid inference rule will stick them there for you if you forget.
And as a final rant, "modern Javascript" didn't introduce semicolon inference; it's been there for a long time and was put there to try to lower the barrier for newbies. It wasn't put there because it's a great design decision.
I come from Scala, and there semicolon inference works flawlessly. Why do you consider it to be an abomination in Javascript? (Except this famous corner case with continued line, almost never encountered in practice).
Things like this[1] are why I dislike semicolon inference. I very much think in language grammars, and languages that do clever things on top of that tend to annoy me. And, yes, I realize significant whitespace is likely implemented as a an edge case outside of the grammar, but it's at least simple.
An interesting thing with Scala is that in the BNF, "semi" is defined as ';' or nl.[2] After doing some initial reading about Scala, I was pretty much wondering why Scala needed semicolons at all. What you call "semicolon inference" seems like it's more like "optional semicolons", in that the language doesn't really need them.
Well... This is a sort of whitespace sensitivity, and I don't really like it, because that means that some tokens may or may not be meaningful depending on the context, which increases the complexity of the syntax -- and syntax is probably the first thing that I think should be dumb simple and predictable.
