>>3
OMG you are fucking stupid.
It's not Java's speed what bothers me. In fact it's reasonably fast. It's that it's just the worst OO language ever, with the worst API ever. It's all a stinking pile of enterprise shit.
C++ is an ugly, insane language, and sucks for OO as well. I fact, statically typed languages will always suck for OO.
"Recursion and stuff" can be and should be understood regardless of language.
My recommendation is to start with traditional programming in a simple language such as Pascal; once you get the idea you quickly jump into something decent and useful, i.e. C, and start abstracting from bottom up, so you get a good understanding of the internals but then move on to something more interesting and productive. After C you learn Python or Ruby, discover what's OO and how is it done right, and start dealing with lists and dictionaries like you say hello world. Then you progress through learning more advanced programming techniques, and at last, you try Scheme or another functional language. Not that much to do with them, as more general purpose, multiparadigm languages such as Python are better to get things done, but it's an enlightening experience you need to become a really, really good programmer. So once you've climbed up the ladder, you walk down until you find a job. Try Python or Ruby. If that fails, walk down a few steps and depending on your taste and what you can endure try PHP or Java, while you write Python for fun at home. If that fails, or you don't want to do it, try C, then C++--, then C++ in that order.