looking to get out of her current gig in journalism and into software Is this for commercial/employment purposes? If so I'd consider looking at the job market

looking to get out of her current gig in journalism and into software Is this for commercial/employment purposes? If so I'd consider looking at the job market for desirable positions and selecting a tool set from there. Even if the idea is to build products for sale/use from scratch herself it's probably worth understanding the field as it stands now before diving headlong into a programming environment that isn't going to be a good fit for the applications in question. Python is a good starting point for intro to computer programming, but at very least (and I'm out of my league here), she should tour and understand the differences between popular FORTRAN environments, Python environments (scipy), Java environments (I don't know where to start), Mathematica, Scilab, Octave, and R.