I think the real issue in the whole debate is that 95%+ of people programming do not understand how programming languages are implemented and haven't been exposed to basic theoretical stuff e. g. to the fact that languages can be ambiguous, that there are cases where it might be impossible to interpret a part of the code, that handling syntax errors is actually hard etc. This post is a good example, it completely misses the point, as the only reason semicolons are present in some languages is to make parsing possible. I think many people would not argue about this if they had a clue why programming languages syntax is the way it is.