The assembly analogy is one that’s come up a lot in response to this article, and here’s my take: yes, I do think that programmers would benefit greatly from an understanding of the _entire_ stack, all the way down to assembly. I don’t think that for a novice this would be the best approach, but, here I’m only saying to go down a level of abstraction into the world of pure JavaScript. JS is itself already a dizzyingly high-level abstraction, and so maybe after a while and a bit more experience, that novice will then drill down into the world of browser internals, JS interpreters, compiled languages, etc. At that point they won’t be as much of a novice, because they are learning about what is happening when they write high-level code.

That being said, I think that orienting yourself around results and passion is always a good idea, and if React gets you there then that shouldn’t be overlooked. Thanks for the read.