I know I’m late to the party, but this issue reported in Bootstrap has created quite a stir across the Interwebs and Twitterverse.  Chants of “Down with Semicolons!” by the “JsHipsters” and of “LEARN 2 CODE NEWB” by the “JsVets,” though entertaining, aren’t really doing anyone in the community any good.

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Let’s look at what happened here.  Someone reported that JSMin produced incorrect output when run on Twitter Bootstrap.  Jacob Thorton quickly chimed in:

Hmm.  So, instead of even considering that maybe there’s a problem or looking at what could be done in Bootstrap to fix the issue, Jacob just closes the issue.  To be fair, it does look like the issue was fixed in Bootstrap when Jacob replied, but that wasn’t mentioned in his original comment.  Well, Douglas Crockford chimed back:

How productive.  It gets better though, as Jacob is quick to retort:

And from there, it derails into nearly 200 comments of this sort:

Yep.  Productive.  Let’s look at what could have happened here though:

Jacob: Ah, thanks for reporting that.  We’ll get that fixed.

Douglas: Huh, looks like this style of writing JavaScript isn’t fully supported in JSMin.  Since there are a lot of people writing code this way, I’ll add something to handle it.

Both tools would have been better off.  Instead though, we have people bickering, on the Internet no less.  Oh well, at least it was entertaining to watch.