More Than Changing Gears, Changing Transmissions

I have a friend. He plays drums. He's a good drummer. We were talking recently about playing, and he said that he plays guitar some, but can't get into it as much as the drums, because he's already hit a certain level with the drums and he can't get to that level with guitar, and he gets frustrated. I'm the same way with non-guitar instruments: when you get past the point where the novelty is amusing, you're stuck at the point where you're struggling to do things you fly through on other instruments, knowing you could be working toward the next level on your primary instrument instead.

I consider myself a Perl programmer. There's interesting things I do with Javascript, but if there's any decision to make on my part on how to implement something, I will choose Perl. I have spent over ten years in computing and there have been few problems where the solution wasn't a sudo cpan away.

There's a program. It handles big data and makes graphs and such out of it. It's a big graphical Java application. There's a lot of things that it does, and if you mean to use it once or twice, there's a lot of powerful parts, but if you need to use it many, many, many times, it gets to be ponderous. There's been requests for a programmer API to be made for this, but that is, at best, still in the works.  So, I've been trying to use Sikuli. Sikuli uses screen captures to find where to click. It's a neat thing, but there are a few issues. It's also written in Java, and it uses Jython, an implementation of Python in Java, for scripting.

Which leaves me having to learn Python. There's significant enough syntax differences that I feel like I'm learning to program from scratch. I've just searched Google for for loop python and python arrays, to show exactly how back-to-the-start I am.

I don't know. There's probably something good about this. I'm being stretched to figure this out. Plus, of course, I get one more name to tag onto the end of my resume. But it doesn't feel like it's a good thing. It feels like a pain, like frustration.