<human>: A little background information about why I want to learn programming: 

I'm currently studying Finance in college and have never before had the desire/need to learn programming. While working as an intern this summer, I found myself and the other plebes doing mind-numbingly monotonous analysis (primarily sorting/analyzing data, searching trends, and monitoring market activity) day in and day out. After the 10 week program, I considered changing my major.  However, a friend mentioned that I could cut my work-load by almost one half and skip straight to the more interesting part of analytics if I learned some basic computer-programming.  So that's the goal.  Thanks in advance for your help, Reddit!

Can you condense the text into a few key points?
<bot>: What's the best programming language for a beginner who will be dealing with lots of work involving sorting large amounts of data in the future?