Yeah good point, impossible to forget what it's like not to know something. I also haven't done systems programming in a long time - so it would really be more fair to have someone comment who is considering a language under higher performance constraints.
That said, I can report on what I prefer right now, knowing what I already know (having spent 4 years programming java professionally as well) - and I truly prefer a more functional approach that comes a lot more easily in languages that support closures and first class functions. It also strikes me that many of the best practices in java / c++ are basically moving towards more functional programming (prefer composition to inheritance, make objects immutable by default, interfaces over classes when possible, dependency injection / referential transparency and parameterizing methods by interfaces e.g functions).
This is partially why you picked up Python so easily. It's one thing to approach a language like Python as your first, but if you took the dive and learned c/c++ prior, everything else is going to be much easier to grok.