I'd say "It doesn't work well in most shops" is a damn good reason to not use something.

In general, very little of the program needs to be written in C to get great performance gains.

Additionally, python is vastly different from LUA. Lua is still a scripting language, ruby and python have moved past that.

For someone at age 18 or so, I'd say C is a much much better level of complexity to be tackling that C++