Making web apps in Rust is pretty cool from a "let's push the limits of this systems language" point of view. But what I'd really like to see is all the security apps starting to be built or even rewritten in Rust. So far I don't think I've seen too many.
I'm pretty sure this will happen sooner or later. My guess is that people who deal with those things are naturally cautious, (hence "security") so it might take some time.
I suppose it depends on one's background. It doesn't bug me that much, but coming from scala background I just take functional/monadic approach and it feels right.
I proposed making it insignificant several years ago and most of the Rust community wanted it to stay the way it was, so it was abandoned. I don't actually really care much either way.
Don't think of it as optional semi-colons, think of the { } block syntax as containing zero or more alway-semi-colon-terminated statements, as well as zero or one bare not-a-statement never-a-semicolon expression giving a value to the whole block. <:D
