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.

Seriously? So in your book, a doctor who has spent years at medical school and practiced in the field for years more is a "palm reader," but whichever unlicensed, unregulated nobody who reads you your 23andMe test results is a "scientist"? I guess in the unmitigated bullshit stakes, that makes you a dean of medicine.

They sure would shut down Wikipedia or RXList if those services allowed you to make an appointment to consult them for medical advice. Even campus health nurses have to be licensed.

What Wikipedia offers now is pretty much the same thing as reading information out of a book. You can't stop people from doing that, and there's no law against it.

What 23andMe does is market a product that you use to extract unique information about your own body, which is then presented to you in the form of suggestions about what health measures you should take -- in other words, medical advice. Very different.

...and if you want to convince the right-wingers, come up with a number for how much all of this costs the country, in terms of hospitalizing people who don't have insurance, etc...

Don't be dense. It's not a case of "if some people get vaccines we get no cases and if nobody gets vaccinated we get 175 cases." In France, where the instance of non-vaccination is much higher than it is in the US, there were five thousand cases of measles reported in the first three months of 2011 alone. You want the US to go that way, keep thinking measles vaccination is "not a concern."

You've just crossed the divide where my perspective is different than yours. When I was a kid, there was no chicken pox vaccine and everybody got it. If you knew a kid who had it, your parents sometimes sent you over to "say hi" to that kid, in hopes that you would catch it, because generally the younger you caught it, the milder the effects. (It's not much fun coming down with full-blown chicken pox as an adult, like my friend Dave eventually did -- picture trying to shave.)

Anyway, "two weeks of hell" is hardly how I'd describe the chicken pox. Two weeks of skipping school, getting to sit in front of the TV and watch anything I wanted, eating whatever I wanted (though to be honest, my sense of taste went funny while I was sick so not everything was enjoyable) and generally having a nice bed-rest vacation is how I remember it. When I heard that they were handing out chicken pox vaccines to kids, my first thought was "pussies."

But, I guess times change.

The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.

For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.

On the far end of the scale, "false positives" for some diseases could be catastrophic -- say, if a woman was erroneously told she had a high chance of contracting a certain type of breast cancer and decided to have a double mastectomy, like Angelina Jolie had done.

23andMe claimed that all it was doing was giving people information. But really, the way the information was structured and presented to the customer made it clear that it was designed to be diagnostically relevant and that they should use it to make decisions about how to proceed with health care. Any service that performs that function clearly falls under the jurisdiction of the FDA, IMHO.

And there you have it, folks ... the man who, quite without irony, spreads misinformation about vaccines in a /. post specifically about how people are getting sick because of misinformation being spread about vaccines.

Get your tetanus boosters, folks. You need one every ten years.