"It almost feels as though already being able to program is actually a hindrance." Hmm , that's interesting i faced the same problem. Fwiw , here is a techniq

"It almost feels as though already being able to program is actually a hindrance." Hmm , that's interesting i faced the same problem. Fwiw , here is a technique i use to ease the learning curve. I picked up a light-weight project - Lancet from Stu Holloway's book. Following the book, i wrote all the code tasks given there in the known language (Java or Python)- to understand the problem- and then transcribed it into Clojure. Initially it was really bad non-idiomatic Clojure , i was aware of this but would consciously only aim to finish the task. This gave me some confidence, made me "think" in Clojure and allowed me to learn some of the clojure libraries. I have finished the book. Now, i am looking at the clojure-contrib code and discovering/learning idiomatic Clojure and going back to my Clojure code and changing that to be more idiomatic. This time i don't need Java code to actually understand the problem. Hopefully, at the end of this cycle i will be a little better. I also found that knowing programming language fundamentals helps a little but only in the abstract , it doesn't help in being fluent in a language.