imotor

You can learn to code. If a tutorial looks like brain surgery, then that tells me the teacher is really bad at teaching programming. I once read about a research team that gave participants a song and asked them to go to another room and communicate the song to a second participant solely by tapping the song–they could not sing the melody. Obviously, no one could decipher the song from tapping alone, but most of the participants asked to tap were surprised that the other person could not understand the song. Once you have mastered a complex subject, it can be difficult to understand why others have difficulty picking up the same knowledge and this can be why many advanced engineers are terrible at teaching science.

Try searching meetup.com for a local Javascript class. That way you can ask the teacher to break down the difficult concepts that engineers are normally tempted to speed through.

“More often than not, that statement is merely code for "I don't want to learn a different way of accomplishing the same task."”

I think that underscores why I disagree with your premise. There is more to it than just “accomplishing a task.” Since we’re probably talking about Gimp vs. Adobe Photoshop, here is a performance car analogy. On paper, you could say a Corvette or a GT-R do everything a Porsche Carrera does, and more. And you‘d be tempted to accuse someone that passed on the Corvette or GT-R for a Porsche as “not wanting to learn a different way of accomplishing the same task.” Yet, for some, sitting in the drivers seat makes the difference.

Probably 15 years ago, I gave Gimp a try, hated it, and continued to use Photoshop. Just recently when Adobe started their asinine month to month licensing scheme, I vowed to not give Adobe another dollar. So I tried Gimp again. I will concede that Gimp is probably stacks up to Photoshop very well. But it doesn't feel comfortable and I wouldn’t get work done with it as quickly. It’s that simple. And it’s not for nothing that Photoshop became a verb. There are some open source applications that became the de-facto standard in for what they do, and it would be nuts to use anything else. But it is not that way with all open source software; I certainly wouldn't judge someone for passing on Gimp.