Welcome, Supreme Kai!
Regarding why someone should love C++:
- You do your own memory management, meaning you can tweak things using wonderful features such as pointers to speed things up.
- When you learn a little about Assembly programming, you can use inline assembly to do a few things extra (such as do something to the program if the carry flag is set), though the syntax varies from compiler to compiler since assemblers and architectures are so varied themselves. As far as I know, you cannot use any form of inline ASM or even inline bytecode in Java.
- While it is true that you can compile Java applications to native code, C++ has always done that. Simply put, it is more reliable when compiled to native code.
- While C++ can be complicated, it isn't exactly difficult when compared to C (writing your own addition function in C can be a nightmare). I can say the following statement about any programming language: There's no "magic" behind it. You have to remember that it is only 1s and 0s. You don't directly use those 1s and 0s. You just write the code that uses them. In that regard, any programming language is comparable to Assembly programming. When you do Assembly programming, you have to know what you are working with. The same is true of C++. After all, a variable named 'x' could mean ANYTHING in a couple of years. What is its purpose? Why did you put it there and how did you use it years ago? You need to know what your program is doing.
In the case of Assembly programming, you also need to know your computer itself! - C++ is extensible enough to be able to run on anything. C is a sort of "Super Assembly" language, and C++ is a superset of C. Now "superset" isn't necessarily the same as "better", but C++, when compared to C, does have more features and easier ways of doing things at times.
It took me a while to come up with that last one, but it is true.
Why not Visual Basic or even Visual Basic .NET? The main reason: many programmers don't consider either of them true programming languages. It is all point-and-click pretty much (at least in VB6 and VBDOS it is). Don't you want to actually type some code?
However, I'm not saying VB or VB.NET are bad at all. They are good tools for learning programming, though the extent is somewhat limited. I think Visual Basic isn't as BASIC as its ancestors were. At least some code was used back then...