Slate foresees the death of the semicolon.
The author observes, “. . . in 1848 Edgar Allan Poe declared himself ‘mortified’ by printers once again using too many semicolons. Poe may have the distinction of being the last writer to complain of the semicolon’s popularity.” And we all know what happened to him.
I agree about the value of the semicolon as a punctuation mark; however, I can’t fault Slate’s observation that the rest of society seems not to agree with us.