best languages to learn as a newcomer
mnemonicsloth: she wants to use her maths/physics knowledge towards creating industrial/scientific applications.The functional programmer in me is really happy that so many people are saying "Haskell!" but based on my own experience in applied physics, it's a terrible idea.Programming in the sciences is all about numerics.  That means giant fiddly matrix manipulation libraries, adaptive conditioning, stability bounding, and adjustments for the phase of the moon.There's a pretty simple reason for all the gobbledygook.   Often, the entire solution to a given problem is expressed as one giant matrix equation (i.e. y = Ax), because that's an easy format for a big computer to chew on.  The trouble is, there are lots of possible ways such computations can return a result that looks right but is actually completely buggered. Finite precision floating-point numbers is one, but there are others.  And since inverting one giant matrix is pretty much the only thing* that happens in a computation, you don't have a lot of debugging options when something goes wrong.  So boutique languages like Haskell won't be all that useful except for prototyping because nobody else will trust the numbers you produce.There really aren't that many mainstream choices.  Matlab is the all-singing, all-dancing prototyping tool that you must know if you want to have any dealings with scientists.  Matlab can compile its code to C or Fortran (I'm pretty sure, anyway), which are your two other choices.