Nicely written.

I learned on Apple BASIC, developing crappy text games at home for me and my friends.

I graduated to Pascal and attended a university which taught Modula-II.

The best jobs in my area were PL/SQL, so I did that while stuck in that location.

I vaguely knew people were learning Java in school, then Python.

Now that I live somewhere where both are far more useful than PL/SQL (as are the recent college grads who know the languages), I’m retooling — and employers are having a hard time believing I’d do a good job in Python, despite 2 decades of software engineering experience.

You are a natural. You have the true attributes of an engineer. I’ll answer your language question: a good engineer can program in any language, given a short amount of time and exposure to a company’s codebase. Some languages, as you know, provide more libraries/tooling than others in particular domains. But the most important thing about languages, unless you have a trust fund or want to learn them academically, is which languages are hot in the job market.

I wish you luck, not in acquiring the right mindset but in convincing employers you have it.

They’re not always the best at recognizing it.