also; you can use it; more often; if you use it; incorrectly; if; only; pur;ely; by; ;e;x;a;m;p;l;e;.

Same with em dashes; nested — turducken style — sentences are just how the divergence works.

They’re useful if you want to link two related sentences; Sausage links are good too.

Semicolon gang rise up!

Don’t worry, I’m a Java dev, and I’ll replace the whitespace in my indentations with semicolons. That should keep us sufficiently covered with semicolon usage.

Python is the jazz of programming languages. It’s about the characters you don’t type.

as a fellow Python user, I fucking hate significant whitespace. Also YAML. WTF they where thinking

-1 ∵ Those were spaces you put there.

You thought you could fool me?

“Back in the day”? I still use them \o/

because some languages allow you to write statements  
    that wrap over multiple lines
        in order to space things out that would
            otherwise be crammed onto one line,
    so for the compiler to know when the statement ends
        a character is needed so that it doesn't think the next line
            is part of the previous;
statement number 2 goes here

Without that semicolon, you might have continued to read “previous statement” which makes sense at first, until the words that follow.

Without the allowance for multiple lines in one statement, that second physical line makes no sense at all, despite the first one making perfect sense on its own.

And without the spacing, the run-on sentence would be a lot harder to read.

Sometimes you have to write code a particular way. Here I was making a point. In a programming language there are other reasons.

Far too many writers use a comma, when they should have used a semicolon or perion. It creates comma splices, where you join two main clauses with a comma.

Wrong:

His new car was flashy, it was bright red and had a custom license plate.

Right:

His new car was flashy. It was bright red and had a custom license plate.