I felt the same. People differ in the way they interact with systems and logic. I certainly disliked being fed the Java way rigidly. I actually learned more about basic OOP by simulating it in ADA. Some people like to understand by building. But it's also valuable to understand an abstraction outside of any implementation. In the end it's better to have done both. And I feel strongly that to understand programming, one must write an interpreter and a compiler, so you can reason about the different abstraction levels clearly, without blind spots or dark magic.