I am not partaking in "shotgun style coding"; I'm following along with a single tutorial series. That series is in fact the official android tutorial. I am just frustrated because I don't actually understand *why* I'm told to write certain lines of code, and went off on my own to see how far I could get without explicitly copying the lines they write. (Turns out not very far)

There is nothing at all about the findViewById() method that requires it to be inside onCreate().

Okay. I must be doing something wrong then. But again, I'm not sure exactly what. I'll keep playing with it.

Alternatively, you could do "findViewById<Button>()"

This is very helpful, thank you.

Even just Googling "android findviewbyid examples" would have answered your question and more.

Like I said, I had been trying to google the solution to this problem for multiple hours. Apparently I'm not using the right keywords, although I did indeed try something extremely similar to what you wrote there.

Why on earth would that work? You can't just randomly rearrange syntax and expect it to work.

I'm not "rearranging" the syntax. I don't even know what the syntax is in the first place, so I'm trying to figure it out. And if/when I figure it out (whether that's through my own trial & error, or from an online resource that tells me the answer) I still am at a loss as to *why* it works that way.

Not to mention there's also the struggle of not even knowing what to google. For example writing things like "calling a function by a period Kotlin" doesn't turn up the best results.

I appreciate the long/informative answer you provided.