If you don't have anything targeted don't ignore C++, in particular its subset C. It runs on everything. Being primarily a hardware guy I like making things with embedded microcontrollers - you can design/understand the complete system without making a career out of it. Microchip came out with a free C compiler and IDE which is a lot more fun than Assembler and almost as efficient even without buying the really good optimizer, you can do a lot of optimization in your head if you understand how C will write the Assembler code.
I used to do C++. I like native object code but Python is so easy. By the time I package an app with Python translator and lib files for those without the proper version of Python installed my 10k script has become several megabytes. And runs only on Windows. See
http://jongreen.users.venturecomm.net/almanac/Almanac.html (How to turn 93k into 8M
