Skeptical of rewriting JavaScript tools in "faster" languages

I kind see the points he´s making, however I think there's something subtle here that's worth talking about:

> Rather than empowering the next generation of web developers to achieve more, we might be training them for a career of learned helplessness. Imagine what it will feel like for the average junior developer to face a segfault rather than a familiar JavaScript Error.

I feel this slightly misses the point. We should be making sure that the next generation of Software Engineers have a solid grounding in programing machines that aren't just google's V8 Javascript Engine, so that they are empowered to do more, and make better software.

We should be pushing people to be more than just Chrome developers.

Also, while I understand what the author is getting at, referring to lower level developers as demigods is a little unhelpful. As someone who switched careers from high-level languages to a C++ engineer, I can attest to the fact that this stuff is learnable if you are willing to put the time and effort in to learning it. It's not magic knowledge. It just takes time to learn.

In my experience with Node, these "familiar JavaScript errors" were extremely cryptic and had little to do with the actual issue most of the time. And talking about segfaults is pure FUD - it's not as if a build tool written in another language will throw a segfault at you if your JS code is broken. And if it does, you should file a bug report - same as you would for Node (maybe some JS developers have the knowledge to hunt for bugs in JS-written build tools, but I doubt even those have a particular desire to actually do it).

Segfaults are the easy bugs! You get a handy stack trace right where the problem is, all the variables intact, it's great! It's the ones where you mess up a data structure, or overwrite an array that kill you, with the symptom occurring long after the problem was caused. Much like React, in fact, where problems in React usage don't get reported until the event loop, long after your function creating your component has finished executing. So maybe those developers will be right at home after all.