When you sit back and look at it web application development is a total disaster. If you tried to
conceive of the "ideal" UI platform (or even a "good" one) you would never, in a million years,
come up with what we've got now. It is a testament to the skills of everyone in the industry that
things like google maps, Gmail etc. can be built on this sky-scraper of bananas. No wonder it is
hard to learn.—josephcooney
I completely agree, yet despite being a skyscraper of bananas with a million moving parts, a well designed web app still has both better typography and a better user experience than the vast majority of desktop software—especially desktop software on Windows. What a great example of how tools matter a lot less than most people think. What really matters in building a great product isn't the language it's written in, but rather hard work and great attention to detail.
Hacker New—Why Codecademy is overrated and missing it's target audience