Which Language Next

HI FOLKS,
I ALREADY HAVE A GOOD KNOWLEDGE OF C (POINTERS,DATA STRUCTURES,LINUX PROGRAMMING AND UNIX NETWORK PROGRAMMING) AND C++..I FELT IT WAS TIME THAT I TRIED A NEW LANGUAGE..BUT I AM IN DOUBT WHETHER TO START WITH JAVA OR VC++..I KNOW JAVA IS PLATFORM INDEPENDENT AND THAT IT IS THE LANGUAGE OF THE NET..BUT WILL IT BE REPLACED BY C#..FURTHER IF I GO TO STUDY VC++,THOUGH APPEALING, I WILL BE STUCK UP WITH ONE PLATFORM,WINDOWS..
I COULD SURE USE A FEW TIPS AND GUIDANCE FROM EVERYONE HERE..

WITH REGARDS
SCORPION

Perl is a great language, very robust and you can do many things with it,as an example - here's bit of code that would take all the files in a directory and change them to lower case (useful if your moving from IIS to apache, but there's a hidden point here as well ;-)

#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach(<*>) {
$file1 = $_;
$file2 = lc($file1);
system("mv $file1 $file2");
}

Just learn vc++ and assembler and then will be the right time for you to make a new OS.

i also recommend perl, and assembly i have heard is also good,
i also recommend delphi5, which is very good quick and easy, but it does restrict the OS your using