In article ,
"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.
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?

By far and away, plain old C is the most useful and durable, and code
written in C will always be able to find a new home.

C++ is far more complex, so I would not start there. But all C++
compilers will happily compile plain old C, which is by design a subset
of C++. (The development went the other way: C++ is a superset of
vanilla C.)

Stay away from C# unless you don't mind being trapped by Microsoft.

Lots of business coding is done in Java, such as for websites. Java
works, but is slow. Microsoft has their own variant, J#m which works
quite well. Again, the question is if being entrapped in a proprietary
language is a problem.

Perl, Python, et all are fine languages for what they do, but C/C++ is
the heavy-duty language.

And so on. I made my living as a programmer for 20+ years.

Joe Gwinn