C# is great if you want pure OOP. Plus, .Net is a pretty damn big library. It makes programming a bit like lego. All the blocks are made for you by some guy in a Taiwanese sweatshop, but you can put them together into
anything you want because you're a clever little guy. Really, though, I quite like C#. It's well designed at least. C++ doesn't really have so much a set of features as a pile of them. C++11 has some pretty great additions though, like
auto and the ability to initialise vectors with braces.
I tend to use C++ as an improved C. It has an extended standard library which makes a lot of things easier to do without a big performance hit (I suspect the standard containers are more
OPTIMIZED than what I'd be likely to produce myself). It also has exceptions (which I don't really use much) and namespaces (which I use a lot). Therefore, I tend to write mostly procedural code with a few objects when I want them. Unless I'm writing something that really benefits from having objects, like a game.
>>4
You might want to learn BCPL first.