alt Hacker News> Rich Hickey has a joke about semi-colons in language design
I didn't see semicolons, but I saw plenty of {} braces, and I can't explain why they're needed.
https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare
"I'm already quite sure how I will die: I'll read another article on Hacker News about a new programming language where I see nothing new, and I'll read that they included {}; to make C programmers comfortable. I'll have a massive stroke."
> I didn't see semicolons, but I saw plenty of {} braces, and I can't explain why they're needed.
"Curly braces" (a.k.a. "{}") make lexicographical scope simpler to manage for lexers and parsers. Alternate grammars increase compiler complexity, excluding trivial token replacement.
As for semicolons, they are only a linguistic requirement for supporting multiple executable statements on the same source-code line.