[thekombustor]

When I was learning programming, I had a very experienced friend holding my hand along the way. I felt that this was great for me as a beginner, although sometimes she would way over-explain something that was irrelevant as a beginner.

As time went on, I relied on her less and less, until one day I realized I didn't need her anymore to write anything. At some point during that time, it had "clicked" for me.

I think another part of the click happened when I transitioned from Java to Scala: it made me realize just how much time I was wasting manually transforming types/managing collections when map/filter/fold etc were sitting under my nose the whole time in Scala.

Yes, I know that Java has ways to accomplish the same things with streams/collectors, but it's not even close to as fluent as it is with Scala. For me, the only language I can truly enter a "flow" state in is Scala.