Chances are you forgot to kick it.
The linked article is written by me. It explains how Java streams need a terminating operation in order to start any actions. For more explanations and code examples, do follow the link and read the article. It’s free.
The only time I’ve had to have a “pointless” terminal operation was in some contrived unit test code. I remember putting a comment on the line saying something like “terminal operation so the stream does something” lol. But yeah, I can see this being extremely confusing to novices trying to learn the Stream API on their own.
Right! I had used streams a couple of times but for most work had switched to Eclipse Collections. Some payloads just work better when streamed and I was left wondering why nothing happened!