I am new to this forum. My experience is SAS Splus you can learn and master it easily (master sas is a bit difficult, but u can definitely use it effectively to solve practical problem without extensive training). However C++ is something you need to spend time and energy to learn and practice then you can use it to solve problem. As you may know, the dominate programming language in quant industry is C++ (sometime VBA and Matlab). Based on the above to points I strongly recommended you to learn C++ asap. I have been using some application developed by Java, it is not so good I have to say due to the speed is very slow and sometime even no response after you click a button. Hence C++ is still going to be the best tool in the quant industry.
I am learning it now as well (I already have experience on SAS and Splus and Perl and etc, trust me they are all easy to learn), we can share some material perhaps
