Good suggestion on programming language for finance?

Question

My goal is 1) to obtain financial data from yahoo api or same kind 2) apply data into my model.

I know some R-programming and very basic shell scripting on linux(I am working on ubuntu).

Since I am not expert on any of those and now I have purpose of learning a language, I want to know what type or kind of language would be good for my goal.

I researched a little and Java, C++, SQL are popular but I don't know why they are.

I like shell scripting style.

Any suggestion?

Answer 1

I would use Python. It works very well cross platform and I have seen some great financial data apps made with it. Also if you are using Ubuntu already Python will help you do more with it. That is the reason I decided to learn Python. I use Python 2.7 but 3.3 should work just as well.