As a former C++ programmer, I would say stick with C++ <i>BUT</i> be aware that its a dificult language with lots of tricky undefined behavior and hidden traps that even professional C++ programmers often forget about. [1]<p>The reasons for stickling with C++ being that you get such things as classes, RAII, runtime type info, the STL and templates.<p>C is probably a good bit easier to learn, though.<p>"<i>the awesome speed of C</i>"<p>Thats a trap. Don't listen to it. Really, by the time you're good enough of a programmer that speed matters, you'll be good enough to make other, seemingly slower, languages fast enough. Most speed is held back because the program simply isn't compute bound. Writing in super efficient highly-optimized assembly isn't going to make a program which blocks reading files or network sockets go any faster. Also, good data structures and algorithms do a lot more for performance than the inherent speed of the language. For example, in another comment I stated that I managed to get a python program take 20 minutes, down from 1.5 hours, by using a tool to translate it to C - but then rewrote the bottleneck in python, with a better data structure, and it ran in 40 seconds (at which point converting it to C actually made it slightly slower).<p>Very few programs really need to be so fast that writing in C is worthwhile and by the time you find your language to be the limiting factor, you should be a much more experienced programmer and picking up C then will be a lot easier.<p>My final advice is to pick a higher level language - Clojure, while fundamentally different from C++ and Java, is a very powerful language with lots of very high level abstractions (and streamlined access to Java code, so your Java skills will translate nicely to Clojure). If you're looking for a more mainstream, easy to learn language, I would suggest Python or Ruby - both of which are great high level languages and will serve you well, even if, in the future, you learn C.<p>[1] <a href="http://scapecode.com/?p=107" rel="nofollow">http://scapecode.com/?p=107</a>