Ed Huntress wrote:
I know, I should ask this somewhere else, but I don't trust somewhere
else...

My son is an economics researcher for a think tank, and he uses statistics
programs -- SAS, SPSS, and SDATA -- all day long. He took it upon himself to
learn scripting for all three, an he's become pretty facile at writing
scripts in their dedicated scripting languages. Now he wants to learn
something about programming.

He has no interest in becoming a programmer, but he'd like to know something
that may be useful in his work (he had a math minor, and he's now going for
a Masters in applied mathematics). I used to dabble in C and Assembly, so
he's asked me what he should learn. I have no clue.

Some people he works with have recommended Python. I know nothing about it.

Python is a 3rd generation scripting language and is pretty good.
(Perl was 2nd generation, and Tcl was 1st generation.) It has its
flaws (as do all languages), but it has a huge user community so there
are plenty of books and forums to buy or visit.

I suggested C, but I made the mistake to telling him it's like Latin for a
language major, and he hated Latin. He's not going to be doing anything that
relates to the Web. His interest is mostly in things that will help him deal
with data.

Any thoughts?

If he is into statistics, R is what everybody is using.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)

He should probably start with R, then think about Python.

-Wayne