Exactly my experience - coming from C++, I never had to "learn" Java at all, and (at least until recently) there were only a handful of Java idioms that were un

Exactly my experience - coming from C++, I never had to "learn" Java at all, and (at least until recently) there were only a handful of Java idioms that were unique to it that you had to grok. And this is exactly what you'd expect from a sensible pragmatic language design back then - take the dominant language in a domain (C++) and simplify it.