closetoretiring

Both my son (a freshman in CSE at Ohio State) and my future son-in-law (a graduating senior in CS at Ohio State) are both heading down the developer path. What specific languages do you recommend they focus their efforts on? Your comment about writing code makes sense to me...in what venue do you suggest they do that? Clubs at OSU? Are there online crowd-sourcing code-writing opportunities? Sorry if that question sounds a bit clueless, but I work in Bus Intelligence, and my coding is limited to SQL, Excel & Cognos, so I don't have much advice to offer either one of them. Also, my son has been working since he was 14--great work ethic. Do employers see the value of that--are they looking for that? Thanks for taking the time to answer questions and provide this online mentoring.

Thanks. If you used Pascal, you must be closer to my age than my kids'. I did all my high school and college programming on punch cards! I'm thankful everyday for the advances in computers, and can't wait to see what else develops in my lifetime. What a great field to be in!