Back in 1973, if you needed complex numbers and didn't want to implement them yourself, Fortran was pretty much the only game in town. These days any language with a decent Object system has a Complex Number implementation.

On another subject, given all the great Statistical tools/languages out there, why SPSS? Most recent version changes have broken working code in a dramatic and undocumented ways for no known benefit. Licensing has always been a nightmare and has gotten worse over the last 3 years. It's as bad as most business software was in the mid 80s.

Unfortunately, most of the SPSS users I've met are unwilling to learn another tool.

If you have someone who is not yet hooked on SPSS, don't do them the disservice of pointing them that way.

Your points are well made. I cited the examples I did because
• I'm a dinosaur, and mentioned territory from my past (I partially paid for Sophmore year by writing and consulting SPSS)
• there was a point (when memory and disk were expensive) that Fortran-77 had an incredibly optomized floating-point library. I realize hadware limitations are seldom a primary concern these days.
In the real world, I would never suggest a first language for someone to learn. When my son was in high school (10 years ago) classes in C++ were offered; the high school my wife teaches in offers classes in Java. Anyone interested in learning a language has more opporunities available to them than talking to me. 8-)

Having said that, I still don't know if there's a "one size fits all" first language, short of Logo in grade school.

How about you? What are your experiences? What would you recommend?

I suppose I'm also a dinosaur. My comment on Fortran was mostly to justify your college's choice in that era. Fortunately we live in a much better world today.

My horror about SPSS was the main reason I even followed the 'reply' link. For legacy Statistics processing, I've seen more SAS source code floating around than SPSS. When our researchers bring in a Statistician, these days he's more likely to be equipped with R or S-Plus or Stata. But I'm a bit out of my field there.

On those times I've been asked for a beginning language, I've pointed people toward Perl and Python mostly because of their approachability and general usefulness. SQL is a useful tool, but not for learning programming. Languages like lisp, forth & haskell should be picked up at some point by a serious programmer if for no other reason than to teach the brain to work in different patterns. BASIC is just harmful. My use of C had decreased quite a bit and these days is pretty much limited to patching FOSS to work on an older Sun machine.