Start with a real example, you must focus on something practical or a specific task you want to achieve, please let the Linux kernel development in a corner for a while, I'm sure you'll provide good patches to it in the next few years but at least you need to focus in basic tasks before scavenging the kernel.
The perfect programming language doesn't exist, there're a lot of them, everyone does specific things better than others, you may apply some of them in a particular field and they're good options for that field. For web programming there're for example Python, PHP, Java, Perl; for kernel development C is one of the best and so on. The same language you've learnt to achieve specific goals may suck if you apply it to another task (PHP for kernel development sucks, same as C for accounting apps).
First of all: decide what you want to do, than choose your preferred language to achieve that particular task; at the beginning try to do something simple, kernel development may follow later.

Ben

Hope you got most valuable suggestions from already other users.

But C/C++ apart, if you want to build everyday applications in a Linux system (I mean apps. here are the user-space apps.),
then my suggestion is learn PHP and use PHP. It is best simple extremely quick and get you job done immediately.

PHP is not suited for long time running apps. for example daemons. So if you have a large app. if it is daemon, again you need use C/C++ for that purpose. PHP is a scripting language but 200-times better than bash programs.

Any CLI based user-space apps you can use C/C++ or Java or PHP or PERL and so on.

So in this context PHP can be used.

Also second advantage is that with the same PHP you can even write web-apps, dynamic HTML pages and so on.

So it is extremely versatile !

The perfect language is Assembly Language. :-) :-)
but it's not portable.

The language you want to learn is C.

After that you can learn some of the other languages.

Wayne Sallee
Wayne@WayneSallee.com