Ed, at the risk of starting a firestorm if there are any Java or C#
programmers lurking on this ng...

If the shop he works in uses Microsoft technologies, VB.Net (Visual Basic
..Net) would be a pretty good starting point. The syntax is straight-forward,
doesn't nitpick about case-sensitivity, semicolons, and curly braces and so
forth, and has proven to be a good platform for people who are primarily
interested in solving computational problems as opposed to involving
themselves in religious wars about programming languages. However, it runs
only on Windows OS's (setting aside the problematic Mono platform-neutral
variant for the adventurous and highly-motivated).

On the other hand, if his shop is Unix-based as many academic and research
institutions are, Java would probably be his best general-purpose language
choice. Like Microsoft's C#, it's a member of the C-language family and thus
familiar to anyone who's programmed in any other C-like language. In fact
it's not a hell of a lot different from C# in its fundamentals.

Like you, I cut my teeth on assembly language and C and other languages from
the distant past, and have worked professionally in well over a dozen
languages and dialects, to include C++, Pascal, C#, Prolog, Smalltalk, and a
host of others. For a personal project I'm inclined to use C#, but the
company I'm currently working for dictates VB.Net so I'm happily programming
away in it and only occasionally slipping in a little C# where I can justify
it.

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting