I generally use R or Python for programming, but I tend to work with data analysis quite a bit, so it's kind of natural. I'm using C++ and SQL more now, and I'm trying to steer away from R due to its low speed. It is really great at performing complex tasks very quickly when you want to reshape/visualize data as long as the data sets aren't too large. Otherwise the overhead for for loops becomes too much and you either use Rcpp w/Armadillo, find a library that does what you want it to, or use another language.