What I learned by reading Businessweek's incredible 38,000-word article on code

What programing language should an engineer/scientist learn today?

Assuming the person is primarily interested in something other than computing, I would recommend Python. It affords highly flexible access to copious computing resources below the application level but above the true nitty-gritty. It will complement the high intelligence of your generic engineer/scientist.

If the person is truly interested in computing, however, I would recommend starting with an assembly language — not important which one, since you are doing it to learn, not get paid — and then learn a high-level language such as Lisp or C or D or Rust or Go. Avoid Java if possible (Scala or Clojure are ok, but Java is for proles). Avoid .Net as well, since it's a Microsoft ghetto.

Being proficient in assembly language and Lisp, a person can learn whatever is needed to get a job from manuals and justifiably sneer at those who write help-wanted ads.

I agree with Palmer: if you want something that can display nice graphs and solve the types of problems an engineer is likely to work on, I think PYTHON is probably something you should take a look at.

(You may also want to take a look at “R” and “R Studio”.)

For certain types of problems, (don’t laugh too hard), consider Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic for Applications...VBA. Or Microsoft Access.

Although C++ is an *excellent* language (with the STL), it is probably harder to use and will require specific additional libraries to do statistical analysis and graphing. It would take additional effort to find something you like; and the C++ language is less forgiving in some ways.

If you need to control hardware, by all means go for C++ or Assembler. But if you want to solve business-like analysis problems, I don’t think the C++ is the best tool for someone who isn’t wholly dedicated to code.

In my opinion, for engineering problems, using C++ for the specified problem domain is more like flying a Boeing 747, as opposed to a Cessna. It’s overkill and will reduce the choice of airports where you can realistically and easily land. (Having said that, if you already know C very well, then C++ might be something to take a look at anyway.)

There are open source tools for both, why not just give it a try: think of a fairly simple problem that represents the type of work you want to do and try to code it in each language. Measure the elapsed time. Reflect on which tool made it easy or hard, and in what ways. Then make your decision.

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