sleepingpills

This is assuming that the system would be inherently trustworthy and trustable with no human oversight. I have a nagging suspicion that over time this system would still settle in a state where we have just as many humans involved in ensuring everything is kosher as we have now, but compounded with a system that is less transparent for someone who is blockchain illiterate.

Assuming that voting would become effectively free, the second point does sound quite intriguing. It's the sort of direct democracy that is practiced by some countries (e.g. Switzerland). It does require a certain level of voter education though - so people look at the longer term. Otherwise you'll never push through an initiative that raises taxes for example.

There is no need to be defensive, I wasn't implying that you mustn't do it.

You brought up scientific python specifically, but this tend to involve (in my experience) overwhelmingly native code with small amounts of plumbing written in python. Numba is already a restricted subset of python, and without porting at least parts of numpy, you are further restricted to just a subset of that subset (by giving up vectorized numpy ops).

I totally agree that playing around with it will be fun, I'm merely pointing out the fact that you chose perhaps the least amenable kind of python code for this particular task.

Again, by all means go for it! I agree that there are lessons to take away even if it doesn't lead to anything specific.

Edit: you also seemed to imply that there is some inherent benefit in moving scientific/numeric computation from python to JS (and the browser). I was honestly interested in the reasoning behind this. I know that numeric python could do well with a proper JIT for example and a lot of research went into JS VMs (pypy doesn't count yet).

The problem with your suggestion is that scientific/numeric python tends to rely very heavily on numpy/scipy/pandas, most of which are in turn written in C/Fortran/Cython. Meaning, you could only funnel the glue code to JS, not the code that does the heavy lifting.

You'd need to also port the above libraries to JS, which would be a pretty large undertaking.

Finally, grid computing is not any easier in JS than in python, since python already has lots of bindings for the required tools (e.g. take a look at http://star.mit.edu/cluster/ which even comes preinstalled on EC2 AMIs).

Edit: I just noticed that you suggested using JS for distributed computing in lieu of python. Care to suggest a scenario where JS would be a better suited language? Why would I want to run scientific computing in browsers?