I once had a friend in college who, upon realizing that he would be separated from a person for an extended period of time, would always say, “The universe will bring us back together.” It didn’t matter if they were to be separated for 2 days or 2 years. He always felt that events would align naturally somehow, and he would see that person again.

My friend said it just made more sense because the phrase doesn’t mean that their relationship is over forever. Whereas, “bye,” “maybe I’ll see you again,” or “goodbye until later” to some is considered forever.

“The universe will bring us back together” is a good phrase to use when you hope to see someone on good terms. I liked his positive outlook so I adopted it.

As I start the last week of my internship, I have realized that  I have learned so much personally and professionally. I don’t really think of my internship ending as a “moving on,” rather, as a “the universe aligning.”

I plan on going further, and I am super excited to see what comes next in my life. So, I hope your summer was as insightful and fun as mine. And I do hope that the universe will align to bring us back together.

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The answer is simple: a semicolon is a powerful tool to be used in programming.

Some programming languages that use semicolons, such as Javascript, are inherited from the C syntax. C syntax is the syntax of the C programming language, or the rules for writing software using that language. The semicolon was introduced as a statement separator in whitespace-ignoring languages, because it is easier to design and extend a language that has a statement separator.

Continuing with the Javascript example, in Javascript, you must end a statement with a semicolon.

You wouldn’t say:

const apple = fruit  ←thereby ending a statement with no semicolon.

Instead you would say:

const apple = fruit; ← ending your statement with a semicolon.

The first statement would show error messages in your console or text editor, whereas the second statement would run without any error messages.

For the latest projects that I have been working on, I have only used React or Ruby on Rails. React is a popular Javascript library. Although React is related to Javascript, the use of semicolons when using this library is optional (meaning that there will not be any error messages that appear in the console because of the end of the statement).

For Ruby on Rails, another popular server-side framework, semicolons don’t exist! It has been an interesting switch using both the library and the framework. When I review my code, I keep thinking that there is something wrong with my syntax. Who knew using a punctuation mark could have such an effect?

Before I began coding almost three years ago, semicolons were only used in my job correspondence. Now, I feel weird if there isn’t at least one semicolon in my professional and personal responses. Now that I have spent significant time with other software engineers, I have learned semicolons are a coder’s choice, or not even required in some programming languages. The fact that semicolons aren’t needed in some programming languages makes me sad; in my opinion, I think everything would look better with a semicolon.

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