Cee-Plus-Plus, natch'

For versatility, portability, and a well-established code and documentation base, you won't beat it. To learn/improve, I'd recommend the MS VCC IDE... the IDE actually helps you with the syntax, so your' learning curve isn't quite so steep. Once you get the hang of it, you can hop onto Unix and use gcc or what-not. This is a very powerfull language, but the Object-Oriented Paradigm shift puts some people off at first. If you use C++, you should take the time to learn OO Design and UML. A great tool for doing this is a diagramming app like Visio or Rational's Rose. Gee, can you tell that I'm a software engineer?

Visual Basic is easy and fast, but I've had some minor trouble with it in the past. Especially when I use Microsoft Access for a data source! If you want to do web apps, however, this is an excellent language. The designers built tons of functionality into VB... for example, I can build a dialog box with a fully functional web browser in just a few lines of code. Sockets are a snap as well.

Perl is also a great language. What typically happens is that you write a short Perl script to do some task, and it eventually develops into a full-blown tool!