No, you're normal. Couple things though: The knowing how to fix it when it breaks isn't a real problem in my experience with Java... the stuff that tools tend t

No, you're normal. Couple things though: The knowing how to fix it when it breaks isn't a real problem in my experience with Java... the stuff that tools tend to generate for you is so boilerplate there's not much mystery there, so I never felt abstracted from the meat of the programs, really. The Java language, while I was using it, was very slow to change or evolve. Tools, on the other hand, didn't suffer from the bike-shedding and lack of leadership, so they evolved quickly to solve the pragmatic problems they could solve. When I decided to look around and choose a language to re-invest myself in I looked very closely at leadership.. Who the BDFL was (and whether one existed), how the language was evolving, and what the values of the community were. That meant more to me than syntax, though of course they're related. Sort of like "watch the player, not the ball" advice you get in soccer.