I saw a quote recently from Rich Hickey: "Elegance and familiarity are orthogonal." I didn't fully understand this concept until I read your post and found my

I saw a quote recently from Rich Hickey: "Elegance and familiarity are orthogonal." I didn't fully understand this concept until I read your post and found myself disagreeing with you, thinking "what is obstinate talking about? OBVIOUSLY the streams way is way more readable and far less verbose". The thing is, I can't believe I'm thinking that because I was exactly in your place a few months ago. Since that time, however, I've become very familiar with functional styles and now the Java 8 streams way seems "almost, but not quite right" and the imperative iteration style seems "gratuitously complicated and philosophically wrong... I mean... look at all that special syntax! That mutation! The horror!" All of this is to say that I'm not quite sure either of us is more correct than the other, but familiarity does seem to cause a profound mental shift.