Most common programs used by Economists I recently asked a professor if he was planning on hiring a research assistant for next semester. I thought I'd be a pretty good candidate since I have decent experience using STATA, SAS, SPSS, R Studio and Mathematica, but he started asking me about a couple programs I had never heard of before. That led me to wonder what are the most commonly used programs for Economics. A friend of mine suggested I also look into Matlab and Python.
There's three important dimensions for programs/languages:


Convention: Having a program that everyone uses helps you to get feedback/help, work with coauthors, use other people's codes
Ease of use: Since many uses in economics are routines, having the program doing these for you and making your implementation of the use easier is a big bonus
Adaptability: A program that allows you doing covering most of your needs and learning only one syntax versus having to work with different programs at the same time


In terms of frequency of usage among academic economists, here's my ranking:

Top tier


For econometrics, by far, STATA. Mostly because of convention and ease of use. 
For dynamic programming, and to some extent monte carlo, by far, Matlab. Mostly because of convention and ease of use


Second tier


For time series econometrics, Eviews (ease of use)
For all kinds of econometrics, R (adaptability, somewhat convention)
The swiss knife of really anything, Python (adaptability)


Specialists


SAS, for huge data sets
Fortran, for efficient prebuilt routines and large scale computation


This list is of course my personal opinion, and for academic economists only. I believe that no one will dispute the top tier, but the second tier/specialists can be somewhat debated. And then there's some more who are even more specialist (for example, Octave as a open source Matlab alternative)