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.