There is only one thing "wrong" with C++ and that is undefined behavior. An accident of history, but one that will make you cry at times. For the rest the tooli

There is only one thing "wrong" with C++ and that is undefined behavior. An accident of history, but one that will make you cry at times. For the rest the tooling around it is quite depressing as well. But none of this prevents you from getting great work done, they are annoyances. i.e. you can have a solid career with C++ so the languages to learn are suggestions for horizon expansion not career advice. Now it looks like you want to stay close to the hardware so there are a few options that can be interesting to look at. Game programming is not nearly as much fun as game playing so be careful what you want. Rust: the new kid on the block, learning this will help you look different at C/C++ and even if you don't continue using it professionally you will pick up nice things. A scripting language with a REPL. Lua, JS, a lisp, python, perl, ruby, it doesn't matter. Just have a look at one and see what tools to make tools you can build with them. The following I would suggest having a look at but not more than 1 weekend each ;) They are very far from windows apps and game stuff. Ada/spark: the old kid on the block, a could have been interesting. Again not something that is widely used so learn for curiosity not for career. JavaCard: the slow kid on the block. Not talking about plain java here, but specifically the JavaCard environment which is a whole different playing field. You will pick up standard Java as well, by doing this. Massive different perspective, but no games ;( Outside of languages I would spent time picking up Vulkan the new graphics API and OpenCL or Cuda. These will help with getting into the game market but also help you look at visualization and data presentation. Valuable skills no matter where you go afterwards. Remember in the end people don't pay for code. They pay for solutions to their problems. If you can solve problems you will always have a job.