I don't think this is necessarily true. I'm fairly strong in math, and definitively enjoy approaching problems in the abstract. However, even in math, it is oft

I don't think this is necessarily true. I'm fairly strong in math, and definitively enjoy approaching problems in the abstract. However, even in math, it is often the case that by using something you gain an intuition about how that thing behaves. Monads defiantly worked that way for me. I am good enough at math that I could look at their definition and 'understand' what they are doing (it really isn't complicated, its just difficult to explain). However, when it came time to use them in code I had almost no intuition about how they should behave. Now, my understanding of them is (in my opinion) not at all the natural understanding that would arrive from their definition, but an understanding that is accurate, and far more useful in code.