# The End of the Semicolon Era

DevFeed: [The End of the Semicolon Era](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-end-of-the-semicolon-era-26029.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://elizarov.medium.com/the-end-of-the-semicolon-era-60ab95e669ab?source=rss-4762e889f8fc------2>)

Author: Roman Elizarov

Published: 2020-02-09T11:33:53Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Stories by Roman Elizarov on Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/stories-by-roman-elizarov-on-medium.md>)

Topics: [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Programming language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming-language.md>), [Kotlin](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kotlin.md>), [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>), [Scala](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/scala.md>), [Go Language](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/go-language.md>), [Swift](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/swift.md>)

Tags: [go](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/go.md>), [kotlin](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kotlin.md>), [language](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/language.md>), [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [programming-language](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming-language.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>), [scala](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scala.md>), [swift](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/swift.md>)

## AI overview

The article reflects on the decline of mandatory semicolons in programming languages. It argues that Scala, Go, Kotlin, Swift, and the rising popularity of Python illustrate a broader preference for concise syntax, supported by type inference while retaining type safety and scalability.

## Source excerpt

DeadEnd by Austin Mulhern Throughout most of my early professional career, I programmed in languages where you terminate or separate statements with a semicolon; it was like an ideograph distinguishing coders from laypeople. I had a motor reflex to type a semicolon (;) without having to think about it. So when I got involved in the early discussions about the new language that JetBrains was working on back in 2010, the language that would be later called Kotlin, I was not thrilled about the proposal to drop the mandatory semicolons. Who minds the semicolons I thought. I had quite a strong opinion about the need to solve the billion-dollar problem with nulls¹ to make our software safer, but the visuals I cared less about. How narrowminded I was! As it turns out, the disappearance of the semicolon has become the distinguishing characteristic of the rising modern languages of the late 2000s and 2010s to such an extent that it almost becomes synonymous with the very feeling of programming in the "modern language". Scala (2004), Go (2009), Kotlin (2011), and Swift (2014) are all statically typed, all follow C/C++/Java syntactic tradition with curly braces, all were introduced and grew big in the last 20 years and all had totally ditched the mandatory semicolon despite the tradition. Is it a coincidence? I don't think so. I see a trend here. The ground zero Let's take a look at the elephant in the room -- Python programming language (1990). While it is not exactly "modern", it has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity only recently. It became the most popular programming language by some forward-looking metrics like PYPL² and is consistently placed into the top three. Syntactically Python is a thing in itself. It is a rare breed of fully indentation-sensitive language (aka off-side rule³) that is not some kind of an academic or a toy language. The clean and concise looks of Python code are quite appealing. Switching from something as lean as Python (unless you try object-o