Indeed. Data becomes more multifaceted as well, particularly
   when it moves beyond numbers and regains character of
   description.

   I do love data in all of its forms. Perhaps not the statistical
   analysis of it as much due to its ease of belief and proneness
   to abuse, but I like having access to it myself. My advice to
   your son would be to use the language that facilities his goals.
   Facilitate - makes it easiest. There are _so_ many choices in
   language now and it's hard to know what to choose and for what
   reason. I've gone through this myself.

   Sometimes what's not needed is a language at all, but a macro or
   perhaps a script at best. LUA has been gaining in popularity for
   that reason. I haven't worked with it but it seems doable. It
   all depends what you're looking to do.

   Sometimes someone will ask me, "What language should I learn?"
   But I never had any luck learning programming languages. But
   what I *have* had success with is learning a langauge that
   HAPPENS to be the tool already in use or available for the
   project I'm working on. I learned PHP because that happened to a
   website package I wanted to customize was written in.

   Did I master PHP? No. But I can read it and hack it and
   customize it just fine. Fluency in reading code, to me, is
   paramount. Learning to hack existing code for a purpose is
   practical.

   But learning it from scratch? You'll just bang you head against
   a wall unless you have a driving need that THIS language in
   front of you is what you have to work with.