Most of my personal projects have been in C++. Its a flawed language but its the first one I learned on my own, outside of my course work.

I was drawn to it because it gives you a good level of abstraction with small (or zero) runtime performance penalty. The catch of course is that the language is very complex and often has long compile times.

I also really like Kotlin. It solves almost all the problems that Java has, adds a ton more features and syntactic sugar on top of that, all while still maintaining essentially seamless interoperability.