I'm hearing people recommend I try Python quite a bit. I may very well give it a try. I'm not sure why other than a school friend recommending it, but whenever I think "programming", I always think of C files and CPP files, so my first option was to try the C programming language and then C++.

I heard that the Battlefield 2 engine was written on Python, or perhaps I could be mistaking it for another engine, but it seemed pretty cool knowing of something that was finally written on something else.

Even if that would offer some usability improvements, we've still lost something in how quickly you can draw a circle and play a sound. Don't forget your header files, can you use hardware acceleration?

I evangelize a lot for Processing [1] but it is the best experience I've had for getting to draw a circle as quickly as possible. It's a limited subset of Java included in a very basic IDE, that was developed at the MIT Media Lab. Its original purpose was bringing computation and graphics to artists and designers.

void setup() { ellipse(10,10,20,20); }

[1] processing.org