Funny, when I'm searching youtube for boobs and penises, all I get is IT-related stuff!

You don't always need to rely on what others tell you; it's called the power of observation. For things you can't learn through pure observation, yes, you rely on others, but you don't do so blindly, you use those very same powers of observation to tell when what you're being told isn't working or isn't going to work. Will you, yourself, sometimes be wrong? If course, because that, too, is part of learning. I'm sorry I didn't go into enough detail for you, but I'm writing a Slashdot comment, not a Ph.D dissertation; this is something I'm doing for leisure so I might not always maintain your perfect standards of detail. It's funny we should be in disagreement on this point when we're clearly actually not. A source needn't be broadly reliable or unreliable, but for a certain piece of information, yes, a source is either reliable or unreliable; people need to be taught, at the very least, to discern whether a piece of information they are looking at is more potentially accurate or potentially inaccurate and seek out additional sources as necessary, rather than simply relying on a source because "well, I don't know, this guy sounds smart, so he's probably right, I can't check the information for myself because reasons".

Or it means I said re-implement instead of port. for something I'm doing because "that might be fun", that not-so-fun (for me, at least; if you like porting between languages, more power to you) task is a good enough reason to walk away.

You must've been replying to a different post...

My point was that's how you teach people to learn. This is early-childhood stuff, if it's not done by kindergarten or 1st grade, it's probably too late. Once they've learned how to learn, they'll quickly pick up how to apply new things they learn, and the rote memorization of facts our students are expected to do for the entirety of their education suddenly becomes easier, because they've been shown how to find uses for the things they're being taught.

If we can't afford enough kindergarten teachers to keep the classes down to manageable sizes for this, we're already fucked.

Not gonna disagree with that assessment, either. It's not like industry has never been wrong before. I mean, really, the web design community is heading toward vertical-parallax, perpetual-scrolling monstrosities that give 10% of users headaches (literally) and can't be properly bookmarked or navigated. The industry is following them down that path!

There's a reason I'm not following suit: I prefer to make things that are actually usable! Yes, it's cool to add this or that new feature and make it look nice. Everyone wants to feel like what they're building or using is cutting edge, and that's just fine, right up to the point where you start breaking usability in the name of design.

Go ahead, re-implement the select box so you can ensure that it looks the same in all browsers, across all platforms. Add type-to-search and autocomplete to it. I'm all for that, you're improving the UX... unless you don't also handle switching between selections with the up and down arrows, entering and exiting the field via the tab key (trivial if you use a *real* select box and follow progressive-enhancement, replacing the select *for display* with your new control, this is not only possible, but trivial), and confirming the highlighted selection via the enter key. If you don't implement the functionality people are expecting *before* extending, then you're actually *breaking* things. And if you can't implement the native behavior it in a handful of lines of code, you probably shouldn't implement the control at all; most likely, any extensions you make will be inefficient and clunky, as well. But, I digress...

Creating GUI apps on the desktop isn't much better, in reality. You still have a multitude of languages; the application language and GUI framework, which is typically a language of its own (WYSIWYG form builders only carry you so far), if your application interfaces with a database you still have some form of SQL, and that API you need to interface with to access that bit of data from that 3rd party service? If you care about performance, you're proxying API calls through a local server that caches the results; if you need to intelligently clear or refresh bits of that cache based on some bit of application logic, you may need something more sophisticated than a simple HTTP cache, so there's your server-side application language. Don't get me started on version headaches with libraries...

I may have been born in the 80's, but I agree... they'd have laughed and taken away your beer if you had told somebody that programming the web was going to be so much worse than writing native applications. Hell, that's a good way to lose your beer today!

A beta user, I see?

This is one of the things I like most about T-Mobile. They don't care WHAT you do on their network, as long as you're paying for it. I had an HTC One X on AT&T and I had to flash a different CID onto it in order to use HTC's developer tools (e.g. unlock the bootloader so I could install a custom ROM), as AT&T made them disable the feature for phones locked to their network; I then had to flash the stock CID back in order for my AT&T SIM to work. T-Mobile? When I went into the store to buy my M7, they explicitly asked me if I intended to run a custom ROM; when I told them I was considering it, they directed me to HTC's site, even told me which links to follow to get to the developer tools page. Love it.

I won't disagree with you on that front; however, that doesn't mean all web apps are crap -- just most, as decent web devs who aren't acting under direction of the marketing and accounting departments more-so than their managers in engineering are few and far between.

Though, if you'd said no, I'd have done it anyway.

To answer your question...

Slashdot is a web app. You're using it. Must not be that bad.

If only I could post and moderate in the same thread... +1, bro... +1

I moderate; therefore I browse at -1. Word, Office, and yes, sadly, Windows Media Player are very widely used applications; they're the winners in their fields (okay, Media Player may take a back seat to iTunes for iDevice users), which is really painful for me to admit, since I don't use any of them. The products arielCo listed, not so much.

The OP I was referring to was the AC with the 0-rated post. And I, personally, think Office and Media Player are pretty obviously named; Word, slightly less so, but "word processor" is near the top of my list of guesses. Everything in arielCo's post, on the other hand, is an example of a non-obvious name, associated with a failed or failing product, further highlighting the point made by the 0-rated AC post, that products with obvious names are more successful.

Is it cool if I claim to know you? Then, I'll know someone who uses Visio, which will make it the exception that proves the rule :)

This post succinctly describes why I'm not a Java developer, no matter how many times I've set out to learn the language. I'm primarily a web developer, full-stack LAMP and JavaScript (with strong sysadmin roots), so everything I've ever set out to develop in Java had followed the same process: start development, determine I could implement it better as a web app, begin implementing as a web app, get annoyed at reimplementing logic I've already done, causing me to eventually abandon the project. It wasn't until recently, when I started a project that can't really work as a web app, that the light came on and the value of Java (likely as a stepping stone to a number of other languages) became concrete for me; as you said, making it much easier to learn and appreciate since it has a useful context.

This is how people learn. Give them a problem, give them the tools. Hell, show them what the solution should look like. Leave it to them to figure out how to get from the problem to the solution; don't tell them anything they don't ask for. Let them fuck up. When they get stumped, they'll ask for help; show them what they did wrong, don't tell them what they should have done, unless they ask. People are inherently smart, unless you teach them to be dumb.