Interesting last comment (from November 2016) to the original article:
"Important Update *
I am currently employed at Pluralsight, and I feel obligated to point out that the author of this article, our CEO, no longer believes or stands behind any of the content in this article. Pluralsight does not operate under the Deming philosophy. As of January 2017, Pluralsight will be implementing sales commissions again. We have reverted to the typical high-pressure, high-stress quota models found in most companies.
I'm sharing this because I don't want anybody to read this article and follow the bad advice found here. Maybe commissionless sales organizations can work, but apparently not at Pluralsight."
You might also want to look at ren-C (https://github.com/metaeducation/ren-c), a fork of the open sourced Rebol 3 (which isn't an active repo). It can be build with an embedded TCC so you can write C in-line for functions where you need a speed boost.
In the older post you mentioned one of the performance issues being that JS couldn't write directly to the GPU for security reasons and so a copy to the GPU would have to be done after the browser vetted things.
To my _very_ naive thinking, and if video RAM was plentiful, couldn't things be set up such that the JS runtime _could_ write to the GPU, but to a reserved section of video memory that wasn't directly executable? After being checked by the JS runtime, bytecode could be copied over to another area in video memory to be run. Would something like this work? If so, has this approach been tried by anyone?
You will be told it's just fake news. Move along, nothing to see. As to calling spez that, I suppose it's just the angry response at the r/pizzagate subreddit being removed.
Maybe you didn't read the whole article to get Stephen's point that the Wolfram Language allows you to experiment with a very, very wide variety of subjects without requiring deep expertise (but of course allowing for that as well).
So your point is quite valid, one person can't hope to know everything. This is why it's great to find a tool that allows you to dive deeper into the things you do care about.
I see there are lots of skeptics here. Well, as a developer with kids of 11 and 15 (who are not particularly attracted to the idea of programming, in general), I can say that the Mathematica environment/Wolfram Language is both fantastic and effective. So great that I'm willing to plug it despite not being on Wolfram's payroll.
After several years of trying to use this or that other language with the kids in an attempt to stir up some sort of longer term interest and to get them to begin thinking in a problem-solving way, the Wolfram Language is the only one that's managed to produce results and hold their interest.
Two of the most key features of the Wolfram Language, IMO, are the very high level of abstraction available through the many built-in functions and, as a result, the quick feedback given to the user. When I compare the reams of code that must be written in any other language to achieve only a fraction of what a Wolfram Language one-liner does, I cringe at the thought of trying to convince someone (who's point isn't to become a developer, but to simply find a solution to a problem) that they need to man-up and type a book before they can expect any appreciable results.
The book, An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language, mentioned in the article, is also an amazing resource. It begins with no expectations of prior programming experience and progresses at a decent pace with captivating examples throughout.
So, yeah, I'd like an non-commercial (remember that there are free tiers and products) environment+language that's equal (in terms of being very suitable for kids up to domain experts) to what's available from Wolfram, but from what I've seen, there is nothing that comes close. Sure, people will point to the various notebook type environments out there, but these have got quite a ways to go before they reach the breadth and slickness of Wolfram's offerings.
Thanks so much for the upgrade!