"CaveLamb" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:

He's using Windows products, which often have to run all night to give
him a result. There are some minicomputers in the place running on Unix,
but they're reserved for other kinds of computational tasks.


Ed, is this about learning about programming?
or wrangling computers?

He's headed for a PhD in economics, with a master's in math along the way.
His responsibilities at work are evolving. But his interest now is in
learning basic programming, with an eye to learning something useful for his
work. He doesn't really know what he's going to do with it. He does NOT want
to be a professional programmer, although knowing the basics probably will
help him.


In the Windows environment, for actual programming,
ASM - for me, still.
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) capabilities and Visual BASIC
programming.
(macro language for all MS apps)

I think he's picking up some VBA in his work with Excel. I recommended it to
him last summer, when he was beginning to require lots of macros to automate
Excel processes.


May I offer that learning CAD would provide more personal range of
operation that programming skills do not provide.

He has little interest. He watched me fiddling with it for years, when I
wrote the CAD/CAM columns for a couple of manufacturing magazines, and
later, when Ashlar was my client.

--
Ed Huntress