Do not worry about your education getting wasted. C/C++ are probably the most useful languages you can learn. This is the case because (a) most existing code is

Do not worry about your education getting wasted. C/C++ are probably the most useful languages you can learn. This is the case because (a) most existing code is written in C/C++ and (b) C/C++ are probably as low level as one can get while being hardware agnostic, which means programming C/C++ will teach you the nuts and bolts about computers. Also, if you actually manage to learn C and C++ well most other languages will come to you much easier. So you should consider yourself lucky your school is teaching those languages instead of switching to something they think is easier. But it is still a good idea to learn a new language just to get a new perspective. I would recommend that you learn a highlevel functional programming one, like Lisp, Scheme or Haskel. This will really give you a different perspective from C/C++ and teach you to think about programming in a completely different way. I strongly recommend you check out this Haskel tutorial (which I found on HN myself): http://learnyouahaskell.com/ http://learnyouahaskell.com/