That will give you a better baseline on both languages in terms of performance, development time, and possibly maintenance. ... and make sure that you run your python code past an experienced python developer. C is not the only language with room for poor programming to drastically increase ... More on stackoverflow.com

Different languages have different design goals. I'm not really sure of the purpose of your post Take it back to assembly if that's what floats your boat. But, at the minute, you're really comparing apples and oranges Edit: Interested to know why I'm being downvoted for saying C != Python More on reddit.com

Python itself is written in C. The advantage is more flexibility, control and performance. The question is do you need that for what you want to do? There are plenty of C extensions for Python which give you the best of both worlds. As a hobbyist, it doesn't matter. Explore at your own pace and follow your nose. The best place to start is to implement something with it. Build a small program with in C and come up with your own opinions afterwards. You could even build your own C extension (which will consequently improve your Python knowledge): https://docs.python.org/3/extending/extending.html As for C++, that's a much more complicated language which will require significantly more time to familiarise yourself with. The major difference is C is procedural and C++ introduces OOP (object-oriented programming) like Python. They are both statically-typed, compiled languages compared to Python which is a dynamically-typed, interpreted language. This means, greatly simplified, you need to explicitly define the types of values you pass around, and you need to compile a program before you can run it. C# is Microsoft's answer to Java and designed to run on Windows. It is also statically-typed, compiled and supports OOP. I haven't used it much but it is considered a well-designed language with excellent tooling and great for desktop, games and web programming. Learning multiple languages of different levels and paradigms will expand your abilities, but you can likely achieve what you want with Python alone. You mentioned building out an interface (I assume web?). Python with a web framework such as Django is ideal for this kind of thing and would be far more productive than attempting to do the same with C or C++. You mentioned security, system admin, ethical hacking -- plenty of Python libraries for that kind of thing: https://github.com/guardrailsio/awesome-python-security https://github.com/priyankgada/python-for-hackers https://github.com/kahun/awesome-sysadmin (do a search for 'Python') More on reddit.com

Honestly, it does not matter. Depending on area of programming you like, C/C++ might not even be relevant to you. It's barely used in web. A lot of scientific computing uses Python. Python can be a decent first language for the simple reason that there are a lot of resources using Python for new programmers. More on reddit.com