Learn math, and everything else in life gets easier, including programming. We did a quick proof about similar triangles on the whiteboard this morning and it saved us a bunch of effort. Learn programming, and you can automate some stuff that's too laborious to do by hand. I say, learn math first, then learn programming. Otherwise you're bound to spend your days automating the wrong thing. For programming statistics, I'd spend some time with Tukey's Exploratory Data Analysis before writing any code. It's pretty amazing what you can do with pen and paper.