- Appreciating data-types, their limitations and the perils of using casting them incorrectly helped me a lot in understanding about things I need to be careful about
This is a fairly serious issue, but one that can be brought up after the basics of computer programming have been instilled. Most languages are either loosely typed, duck-typed, or have robust conversion features these days. Kids who learn to mangle a string in Javascript will pick up quickly on 'You have to use a 'to_str' method in some other languages'.
The place where this will really catch them is math... but again there are robust solutions in almost all languages.
- Are they going skip the concept of Pointers ? It's not wise to use them unless necessary but to be aware of the concept was very rewarding for me
Pointers in anything other than the very lowest-level-touching-the-metal code are an abomination. They cause far more confusion and grief than they ever help. Yes, there are situations in which the best way to address a problem is to pass a pointer around. However, in this day and age of multi-gigabyte ram sticks, I'd rather bloat up a program's ram usage with maybe unnecessary copies of large objects than dick around with pointers.
- How will they teach multi-threaded programming? We're not quite there yet in JS.
Threading and thread safety are not really beginner concepts, nor are they really required for the majority of code work in the real world.
However, JS approaches the issue obliquely by being bolted onto the threading model of the underlying interpreter. In a browser, which is probably what most of these kids will be learning on, you have to worry about concurrency of the browser instance. If I run a script in this named window, is it going to affect anything in that named window? No, that's not really threading, but it's the same mental concept.
Likewise, beginners are not going to be writing their own output handlers, which is the obvious usage for threading. The advanced ones are going to be playing with painting on HTML5 canvas elements while maybe playing sounds at the same time. They'll be using the browser's already threaded output for those functions.