I saw Zed Shaw do a presentation using factor and decided to spend a weekend playing with it. It was the start of a two year journey that ended with me writing forth for microcontrollers. That was time I should have studied but was somehow always sidelined by other things.
On the bright side, I learned a tremendous amount about lexing, interpreters, exceptions, tail-call optimization, data structures, garbage collection, etc., which opened up lots of possibilities in later projects. With the benefit of hard experience I would never recommend using a stack-based language for a large project, but as a learning tool it has some nice qualities.
I find that most of the bugs I write (which are many) are errors in dealing with mutable state. There is always one stupid little detail that leads to bad state. This has led me to dislike the programming language I write the most (probably python, despite really only wanting to write scheme) because it is mutation first. I was also sad to discover that I couldn't write self-recursive procedures in rust because they are never guaranteed to be actually recursive.
Did you get anything like that from your work with onyx? (And yes, I believe I have actually has a look at onyx about 10 years ago, back when trying to write poatscript).
CS or EE is however my backup if I get injured or for some reason lose my job.
So with a gap working as a classical musician it might mean starting effectively as a (paid) intern, but it would still get your foot in the door.
I don't claim to be representative of all, or even most hiring managers though.
I enjoyed Factor. Fixed stack-effect seemed a nice trade of flexibility for less oops.
I'd love to see someone start concatenative, but with a replace-the-world focus. So move quickly up-scale to single and multiple dispatch PICs, tabled WAM, clone V8 internals, link Z3, etc, etc. "If you're not able to implement other languages in bulk, and better than they are, you're still wedged". Sort of a LispMachine for an age where a much broader-than-cons foundation is possible/appropriate.
I saw the same presentation back then and also spent a weekend with factor. It was a really valuable experience. The language was so different from anything I had previously used that I had to learn a new way of thinking. That was a great thing to go through.
Slava Pestov (the creator of factor) did a presentation on the language at Google back in the 2000s. A highlight from the talk was him explaining that there was a function 'boa' that you could call to construct an object 'by order of arguments'. He called it "a boa constructor." :)