It's fragile, it's highly specialized, and it's overwhelmingly human-constructed. The fiddly bits have very little wedding in anything else, not even human-constructed hardware. If you're fussing in bits which don't impose their own forms of inertia, e.g., CLI tools whose arguments are exposed to shell scripts and hence, if changed tend to break a great many things which is Generally Not Recommended, then you can find that years or decades of expertise can be wiped out in a very brief time.
Unlearning is generally as hard as or harder than learning.
And there's a strong tendency to view the first system you learned as "the proper way" to do things. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
The transition you're going through in Perl => Java is a pretty good example. You happened into a skillset early in your career which was highly capable and offered ample opportunities, but its flower has faded. That's something that the kids today who're building up competency in various currently-popular toolsets might do well to consider. They're starting to see hints of that as tools such as RoR are fading. What happens when we, say, bin the entire present set of Web dev, will be interesting.
And it's happened to whole industries before. Sucked to graduate in nuclear engineering in 1979, or petroleum engineering in 1990.
Unlearning is generally as hard as or harder than learning.
And there's a strong tendency to view the first system you learned as "the proper way" to do things. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
The transition you're going through in Perl => Java is a pretty good example. You happened into a skillset early in your career which was highly capable and offered ample opportunities, but its flower has faded. That's something that the kids today who're building up competency in various currently-popular toolsets might do well to consider. They're starting to see hints of that as tools such as RoR are fading. What happens when we, say, bin the entire present set of Web dev, will be interesting.
And it's happened to whole industries before. Sucked to graduate in nuclear engineering in 1979, or petroleum engineering in 1990.