Sure, as long as you start a program and let it run all by itself without touching anything. As soon as you introduce human input, the system may still be deterministic, but the output of the program is in effect random because the behavior of the operator cannot be predicted. The kind of "knowledge and the ability to comprehend that knowledge" that you describe is known as omniscience, and most IDEs currently don't support it.

40 here, birthday's in March.

A really common one is simply, "I feel fine. I feel better than I have in years, and I've felt this way for months." That's when people really start looking at side effects with a critical eye ("it makes me foggy") and decide they can go it on their own. And often it's insidious; if someone is manic, for instance, at what point do family members step in and say "you're not doing as well as you think you are"? If you're skipping your treatment, you're probably not getting the feedback you need to properly evaluate where you're at.

This is kind of an old-fashioned argument. Modern VMs are often essentially executing native code by the time the code is actually running. If the bulk of the overhead happens at launch time, or a JIT compiler only has to step in every so often, the level of performance can be such that the difference from "pure" native code is insignificant for most applications. Don't mistake a modern VM for a 1980s style Basic interpreter. The two are very different beasts.

No, that's not true. You maybe have things backwards. Mozilla refuses to support NaCl, which is Google's similar-goal-different-approach technology.

You mean like C++? Because that's what you compile with Emscripten.

Really? You're saying the Mozilla developers "clearly" want to switch to Pepper/PPAPI? Because I don't think that's very clear at all.

As for NaCl, Mozilla has been pretty adamant that it's not interested.

You've been modded flamebait, but there is some truth in what you say. I'd argue, however, that it's not that JavaScript doesn't allow good coding practices -- it does -- but that it does nothing to encourage them, and even discourages them in some cases.

You can write good JavaScript code if you know how and use some discipline. In his book JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford encourages developers to use only a subset of JavaScript's features. The subset he recommends isn't as strict as Asm.js, but he isn't afraid to admit that some features of JavaScript are just poorly designed and shouldn't be there -- so if you want to write good JavaScript code, you should ignore them.

I recommend the book. It's a quick read. It doesn't aim to be a tutorial or a comprehensive bible of correct JavaScript practice. At the very least, though, anybody who works with JavaScript will probably come away from it having seen a new perspective on how the language works and how one should approach it.

This isn't really accurate. As you say yourself in a post below, any Asm.js code you can find will execute in ANY JavaScript virtual machine available today. Thus, Asm.js is JavaScript. It's just JavaScript restricted to a very strict, very specific set of rules, with everything else thrown out. It doesn't "look like" a subset of JavaScript; it is a subset of JavaScript.

He didn't say C++.

Yes, but even if you're using Asm.js, you should maybe still think about NaCl as an interesting potential option.

One reason is that you typically don't write Asm.js code by hand. You could, but you'd probably be bad at it (kind of like assembly language -- compilers just know it better than you do). What you typically do is write your code in C/C++, then "compile" it into Asm.js using a tool like Emscripten.

Thus, if you're writing your code in C/C++ anyway, it wouldn't be such a stretch to take that same code and also compile it into a native binary module for those clients that support NaCl (which so far means only Chrome, and it looks like it's going to stay that way).

In other words, you don't need to look at it as an either/or choice. It's perfectly feasible to use both tools, possibly without much additional development overhead.

I've been told that the segment of people on meds for psychological disorders who go off their meds when they shouldn't, at some point in their treatment, approaches 100 percent. (And when I say "when they shouldn't have," I mean the solution for the problems that inevitably arise ends up being to get back on the meds, or similar ones.)

On that score, I can recommend a novel called Nemesis by Philip Roth. I knew absolutely nothing about polio before I read it. For example, I figured polio was a degenerative condition where if you were sick for long enough you'd end up in an iron lung. Nope, you'd go from looking like you had the flu to ending up in an iron lung inside of a couple of weeks. I never knew this because nobody I've ever known, including my grandparents etc, has ever had polio. But once upon a time a lot of people had polio. Vaccination made it go away, and it's absolutely nothing we want coming back.

Chicken pox ain't polio, and to me it was a cake walk, and I never knew anybody who went to the hospital for chicken pox, though I know it happened. But I guess it's better to have a vaccine for it. I mean, when can you ever say that it's worse when we can prevent a disease? I just have this weird thing in my head where it was a rite of passage, and back in the day it was the same for measles et cetera. But ideally speaking, people shouldn't get sick if we can prevent it. It's just the thing.

Yeah, me it was junior high school, so we're talking like 12.

Bullshit. The FDA isn't "shutting 23andMe down." Nobody woke up yesterday morning and was told 23andMe had to shut down. 23andMe had YEARS to get in compliance with FDA regulations, but instead it chose to say "we don't agree that we fall under the jurisdiction of the FDA" and do nothing. And then, golly gosh, it turns out that we do actually live in a society of laws after all. If I was an investor in 23andMe, I would be steaming pissed.