Heh. Welcome to Arduino. It was designed for the artist (well, boostrapped on to the Wiring language, but anyhow....) In any case, is very helpful to grok the philosophy of Arduino. Which can be summed up in the single word "hack."
Arduino programs don't need to be works of art. The philosophy is, work fast, work loose, borrow everything you can and re-purpose it, and if it works, then good enough!
Want to light four LEDs? Copy and paste the same chunk of code four times and change the pin number. Inelegant as hell but it works.
Well, okay. Hacking doesn't mean you can't leverage labor-saving devices. In fact, anything but. Take those same four LEDs. Write something like (below is pseudo-code, do not copy and paste as is!)
int someled = 1; ///LEDs are on pins 1,2,3 and 4
for (someled = 1; someled < 5; someled ++)
{
digitalWrite (someled, HIGH);
}
The most basic and useful tool, a loop that just repeats something you want done over and over (plus changing a few things each time).