The only thing he legitimately did was build a straw man and knocked it down. If a programmer doesn't know how his tools work well enough to foresee any potential gotchas and take steps to avoid them, that's a fault in the programmer rather than the tools. Not a terrible fault; any programmer who's honest with himself will acknowledge that he does this fairly often; especially when he's learning new tools. And will respond to the situation by learning from mistakes and writing better code in the future, rather than writing breathless blog rants that smell of (to use the author's language) butthurt.
Alternatively, we could interpret the article to be based on the assumption that it's common for people whose knowledge of how computers work is so poor that they believe everything north of the southbridge happens instantaneously to be put in charge of making major design decisions for high-traffic sites. But that seems less charitable to me, since it replaces a simple straw man with something approaching delusional paranoia.
Guess what! You agree with Ted then. One of the big problems he mentions is the apparently simplicity of an event driven app.
"Because nothing blocks, less-than-expert programmers are able to develop fast systems."
That's bit he has a problem with. From your post:
"If a programmer doesn't know how his tools work well enough to foresee any potential gotchas and take steps to avoid them, that's a fault in the programmer rather than the tools."
Both of you are saying that a programmer needs to know his tools well. Ted says that Node.js doesn't encourage people to understand the limitations of an event driven framework well enough.
All you good programmers out there: Keep using Node.js. It is a great tool and does things well. But don't pretend that it's the snake oil to make everything faster. The design decisions YOU make have the most impact on the speed of your application.
Alternatively, we could interpret the article to be based on the assumption that it's common for people whose knowledge of how computers work is so poor that they believe everything north of the southbridge happens instantaneously to be put in charge of making major design decisions for high-traffic sites. But that seems less charitable to me, since it replaces a simple straw man with something approaching delusional paranoia.