I'm one of those weird npm style guys, the thing that breaks my brain is this isn't about writing clever code. it is about treating the (literally) single broken case (in the browser) as a broken case. It is about writing safe and maintainable code, by making it obvious that you are dealing with that one special case. I have written js both ways, and I find comma first/semi colon first I am hit by less syntax bugs. Thats why I do it, any other reason would be dumb.
As for crockford leading the way to sanity, the biggest problem I have with him is that instead of warning and educating he flat out forbids, and then heckles people who disagree. "with" is considered a "bad part", but it is used by literally every js template framework. He recommends closure based object construction, but in a big app that is a memory nightmare. And then there is stuff that basically treats js devs as mindless idiots. Like the "new" operator is discouraged, just in case someone forgets to use it when they want to instantiate something or the function keyword is discouraged, because it hoists.
All of those are opinions, and some are demonstrably terrible. But for some reason The Good Parts is still held up as gospel, while the community just chooses to ignore the parts of the book it doesn't like.
As for minifiers, JSMin is pretty obsolete at this point. If you are using it, as an incredibly easy win you can decrease your page load times by using uglify js, google closure compiler, or yui compressor. All of these support asi fully, but that is probably the least important reason to use them.
As for crockford leading the way to sanity, the biggest problem I have with him is that instead of warning and educating he flat out forbids, and then heckles people who disagree. "with" is considered a "bad part", but it is used by literally every js template framework. He recommends closure based object construction, but in a big app that is a memory nightmare. And then there is stuff that basically treats js devs as mindless idiots. Like the "new" operator is discouraged, just in case someone forgets to use it when they want to instantiate something or the function keyword is discouraged, because it hoists.
All of those are opinions, and some are demonstrably terrible. But for some reason The Good Parts is still held up as gospel, while the community just chooses to ignore the parts of the book it doesn't like.
As for minifiers, JSMin is pretty obsolete at this point. If you are using it, as an incredibly easy win you can decrease your page load times by using uglify js, google closure compiler, or yui compressor. All of these support asi fully, but that is probably the least important reason to use them.