Assembly is the only true language anyway. It's the language the other languages are written in. Learn that and you only have to learn something new when a new chip comes out. And the best part is, all the old stuff still works. With Assembly, you're above the OS. Easy to write things that work in any OS.

And any language that begins with word "Visual" is cheating and automatically slow and bloated, no matter how well you 'optimize' it.