Similar experience here. I'd try to understand a concept in the help file, give up, try again the next year and suddenly it clicks. Maybe that's just how the human brain develops.
I really didn’t get it either until I saw how all the good programs were organised as struct types and groups of functions that operate on those structs. Then I was like “oh so OOP just makes that more convenient.” But I couldn’t have realised that until I understood the difference between a well-written program and a bad one. If only I’d had access to as much source code then as I do now!
[–] enneff 9 hours ago