Four short links: 27 December 2010

Compiling to Javascript, Lessons Learned, Idle Insights, and Visualizing Competition

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | Comment: 1 | December 27, 2010

emscripten — LLVM to Javascript compiler. Any code that compiles to LLVM can run in the browser (Python, Lua, C++). LLVM is open source virtual machine that Apple bought into (literally, they hired the developer).
30 Lessons Learned in Computing Over The Last 10 Years — Backup every day at the minimum, and test restores every week. I don’t think I’ve worked at an organisation that didn’t discover at one point that they couldn’t restore from their backups. Many other words of wisdom, and this one rang particularly true: all code turns into shit given enough time and hands. (via Hacker News)
What Your Computer Does While You Wait — top-to-bottom understanding of your system makes you a better programmer.
How to Visualize the Competition — elegant graphing of strategy. (via Dave Moskovitz on Twitter)

http://www.third-bit.com Greg Wilson

emscripten is a nice hack, but I worry about debugging: if I write Python, it’s compiled to JS, that JS runs in the browser, and something goes wrong, do I have a source-level debugger in Python that I can use to diagnose the problem? Or do I have to guess what might be wrong, tweak my Python (probably adding ‘print’ statements, just like 1975), regenerate my code, re-run it, etc.?