WTL Programming Language

[MarSmith]

Working in the IT Industry, however not as a programmer. I found that the biggest help to my career so far (Nearly 10 years in now....), was to learn programming logic, Software development life cycles, and general problem solving. Once you have a handle on that one, you can figure out a lot of languages earlier. (For example, I used to debug kernels a lot, other time help with transaction processing flows, oh and job management....)

For money, and income : COBOL, ADA, C......(Prepare to hate your life though, if you want to work on anything "fun".)

For all around practicality : Perl, Python, Bash Scripting, Power shell.

For usability when you decide to cross to the dark side (IT Management) : Scripting in excel /VBA. (Most of my work is done in excel, and I've built a lot of interactive tools for my job with it, so much that I can basically automate out my existence, well a good chunk of my existence.)

[TheGentlmen]

If your going to simply just make games I would recommend a game engine, the codes already their so why rewrite it?

I would recommend Unity, with the new Unity 5 as long as you make less then 100k you can use it for free, and if you make more (which I don't think you will) just buy it for 1.5k(mind you that its per seat).

An alternative would be UE(but that's more aimed at the big studios and teams rather than the indies) which is 100% free(plus a 5% royalty after the first 3k every quarter(aka after every 1k a month))

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If you must ofcource rewrite all the rendering and who knows what, i would recommend VB.net, followed by C++. If you do change your mind about the  'No Engines thing'(which is why your probably reading his paragraph) you could applies your newly formed C++ skills for UE(C++ + the visual scripting system 'Blueprints') or the VB.net + C++ skills for Unity(C# + JS + Boo)

Or you could learn JavaScript, then Java and finally C# and applie your newly formed skills for Unity.

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If you use a Game Engine or not,  I would still recommend some mukering around it any language in the C family (Other than C itself, memory management is painful, especially for beginners ] and probably Java or Javascript.