I have had thousands of hours of experience with latex and dozens with tikz. I still struggle with it. Its just that Latex has terrible syntax for function decl

I have had thousands of hours of experience with latex and dozens with tikz. I still struggle with it. Its just that Latex has terrible syntax for function declaration, loops and conditionals and tikz inherits all these problems. My workflow is usually to go to http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ a lot and use the examples as reference code to whatever I am doing. The manual for tikz exists but I have never really read it.