Writing more context out feels like boasting, so I think I will skip that and go to a summation/conclusion directly.
Knowledge and expertise comes from more than the language. Which you hinted at. The language is only our interface. How is the language represented, how will it transform the code, how will it be run. There's a lot of depth in there - much more than there is in the language itself.
I learned a lot, through my own studies and reading, studying, projects, and experience. I'm a strong systematic thinker. It all helps me in interpreting and thinking about wide- and depth- context and concerns. I also think my strengths come at the cost of other things, at least in my particular case.
You're not alone. Most developers do not have the depth or wide knowledge. And most [consequently] struggle to or are oblivious to many concerns and opportunities, and to intuitively or quickly understand and follow such information.
Which does not necessarily mean they're not productive or useful.
I'm a bit confused. If you're a Junior dev, don't you have mentors in your team, in your company? They will know the projects and environments of what is needed in that environment.
"give me a specific, clear idea of what skills I might need to have" depends very much on context and goals.
and Firefox still does not have proper PWA support
I recently had to learn about that, targeting PWA. :(
When I read "you can install an extension for it" I thought that would be simple enough. But that extension then requires an additional Firefox installation which causes it's own share of problems. (Comparatively complicated setup process despite simple walkthrough wizard with installer integration, program shortcuts being added, Firefox onboarding being triggered in the PWA.)
Using Mitchell's donation we'll be able to to offer Jacob Young a full time schedule. As a reminder, he's the primary author of the C backend, x86 backend, LLDB fork that adds Zig support, and maintains the eZ80 toolchain on the side, all without even having the ability to bill full time yet!
If Firefox was a better funded and more competent alternative to Chrome we wouldn’t even have this whole Manifest v3 mess since Chrome would just lose all their users.
I don't think that's an issue of competency - which I understand as functionality/feature parity in this wording.
Chrome gained and became this popular likely entirely due to Marketing and big-corp ecosystem network effect through pushing it - through Google, Google Docs, and related Alphabet services.
I don't think Firefox was every really inferior. I've always preferred the dev tools and a few other things over Chrome. There was merely a time where performance was worse, but that likely only mattered in benchmarks - and marketing.
Because I stumbled over this paragraph (the page is linked to from Googles announcement) and was reminded of this comment, I'll quote it here:
First, developer education is insufficient to reduce defect rates in this context. Intuition tells us that to avoid introducing a defect, developers need to practice constant vigilance and awareness of subtle secure-coding guidelines. In many cases, this requires reasoning about complex assumptions and preconditions, often in relation to other, conceptually faraway code in a large, complex codebase. When a program contains hundreds or thousands of coding patterns that could harbor a potential defect, it is difficult to get this right every single time. Even experienced developers who thoroughly understand these classes of defects and their technical underpinnings sometimes make a mistake and accidentally introduce a vulnerability.
Read/Inspect and contribute to FOSS. They'll be bigger and longer lived than small, personal, and experimental projects.
Study computer science.
Work, preferably in an environment with mentors, and long-/continuously-maintained projects.
Look at alternative approaches and ecosystems. Like .NET (very good docs and guidance), a functional programming language, Rust, or Web.
That being said, you ask about "should", but I think if it's useful for personal utilities that's good enough as well. Depends on your interest, goals, wants, and where you want to go in the future.
For me, managing my clan servers and website, reading online, and contributing to FOSS were my biggest contributors to learning and expertise.
When you draw a parallel to social charity both are largely volunteer based and underfunded. And both have direct and indirect gains for society.
Physical charity often serves basic needs. I'm not sure selecting qualifying quality open source projects is as easy. Need and gain assessments are a lot less clear.
If it's about public funding distribution, I would like to see some FOSS funding too, but not at the cost of or equal or more than social projects.
How many FOSS projects actually benefit "millions and billions of people"? That kind of impact feels like it's few and far between.
Is your suggestion that people should? Isn't Rust the more realistic, effective solution because it forces people to do better? Evidently, "correct memory safety in C/C++" didn't work out.
Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.
By any chance, do you use a niche language that has only two programmers?