To be honest, in my experience it doesn\'t really matter which language you start with, just learn 1 or 2 languages thouroughly(oh my, spelling...), then learning more languages will be very easy, it\'s all about using the proper tool for the job and what you\'re comfortable with. Personally i prefer plain old C for most of my personal projects, although i could have written the same program in C++, java, python, perl or basic and could learn enough of cobalt, fortran, lisp and so on to write it in those without it slowing down the project too much.
I prefer C because it leaves me in control, while still being abstract enough to keep the design time/coding time ratio at a reasonable rate.
Also, you cannot really base any statement on languages on what universities and such use, since they might have different priorities than what you have (ease of debugging, fast results over speed and control for example), a good learning tool is not neccecairily a good production tool (although the language you learn in school can be presented as a \"wonder language\" that suits every situation, it doesn\'t).
And Mr. Chi, i suggest going with first learning C well, then SDL, then sockets, then opengl. But your priorities and preferences could be totally different than mine, so you could also take a rather in-depth look at all the languages you could see yourself coding in, and base your desicion on that. Remember to not rush ahead, and remember that what you think is going to take 1 week, will take 3 weeks
