Like human-natural languages, programming languages evolve as well. From the lowish Assembly to high scripting languages and GUI RAD.

But it seems C++ has been the standard for a long time combining both low-level access and high-level. That with the overwhelming support, libraries, books, etc., and it's certainly a good one.

Still, languages evolve, and the goodness that is C++ -- I speculate -- will disappear with the coming of D: http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html .

Already this language is catching on slowly, and it seems like a better C/C++. It has low-level access and high-level access, improves C/C++, while taking the best of Java and C#. Therefore it is higher than C/C++, yet still lower than Java or C#. It also has no VM but just compiles like usual.

Too bad there are no books out on it yet, and that the libraries are so scarce, but I bet over the years D will put its fingers on the game industry and even on systems programming. There's already a game project using D as language basis: http://www.team0xf.com/eng/ .