For someone about to go into a career in medical research, what language would be the most useful to learn? From my limited experience (I have been a researcher in mathematics and in finance) I have been able to recommend looking at R (for statistics) Matlab (for general numeric processing) and Python (for general purpose programming with statistics/numerics as an add-on) but I don't know which of those (if any) are in common use -- or if there are other, more specialized languages that are used.

To be clear, I'm not talking about a professional programmer working in a medical setting. I am talking about a medical or genetics researcher who uses programming to analyse data, or generally to help get their work done.