Actually - if you want a fairly easy stepping stone - go with C++/Qt. Find the tutorials on Qt. Better yet, try out perlqt - get familiar with Qt while still using Perl and then jump to C++/Qt. There are so many things that have been made easier than in many other static type languages. Also, the learning curve isn't that steep. And as an added benefit, it is guaranteed to be crossplatform (well - guaranteed so long as you use the Qt classes to do all of your system operations).
my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];