₦airaland Forum

C. It's the language best suited for running close to hardware. It's used in embedded systems - the domain of EE. You can start by writing simple programs on your computer (if you use Linux, it comes with the gcc compiler; clangs if you have OSX; you can get various compilers for Windows). You can also start with a simple microcontroller like PIC, ARM, or a programming board like Arduino.

Of course you can express programs in higher-level languages like C++, Java, or other scripting languages, but C gives you, as an EE, a better understanding of the machine.

Get him a cheap laptop/netbook. Put Linux or FreeBSD on it. Introduce him to simple bash scripts and javascript. He can easily create some JavaScript within a simple html page on his desktop, then point the browser to load that page.

He should look online, on his own, how to solve problems.

In summary Proficiency with programming is not really something that can be taught in a short period of time; he's got to immerse himself into programming for a few years, to become good at it, just as you would a human language.

In my view, computer engineering (based on electrical engineering) stresses concepts closer to the hardware: embedded system design; CPU microcode design; operating system implementation, networking. On the other hand, computer science (based on math) stresses concepts away from hardware: algorithm implementation and complexity, artificial intelligence, programming languages.

In short, one might hire a computer engineer to build a network of computers, and a computer scientist to create a distributed search engine that runs on the network. I'd assume that a company like Intel leans more towards computer engineering, whereas Google leans more towards computer science.

I studied both.