Understanding Templates: why can't anybody do it?

[Entity325]

Wow, popular thread is popular.

Thanks for all the help, everyone.  I haven't read all of it, but 
I will take the time to sift through everything and see what I 
can apply.

Response to some of what I did read:
-I didn't conclude that templates are confusing because they 
confused me.  I concluded templates are confusing because both of 
the D language reference pages which talk about them have quotes 
at the top talking about how confusing Templates are.  Reflecting 
on my (short!) experience trying to learn them, I merely 
concluded that templates are confusing because nobody really 
makes an effort to explain them cleanly.  Now, the effort has 
been made about 22 times(by my count) in this thread alone, so 
that's a plus!

-While most of my programming professors had a decent idea of 
what they were doing, the classes themselves left massive, gaping 
holes in my education that I never even realized were there until 
I got a job writing Java code.  I don't even particularly LIKE 
Java.

Could just be that I'm a slow learner.

I messed around with Templates after making that post and learned 
that they seem to behave similar to Generic types in Java(I am 
forever finding warnings that a generic type hasn't been type 
specified in our code.  Sometimes I fix it, sometimes I leave it 
alone)  I tried rewriting my structs to utilize templates(I 
currently have separate versions for float and int types) but 
that did little more than illustrate just how lost I was, so I 
switched back.  It should be possible in theory, the question is 
the practice.

Study was further set back by the fact that I suddenly realized 
none of my operator overloads are working... at all.  It looks 
like it checks with the language reference page, but I think it's 
time to write another toy-sized learning program.