I'm surprised with all the flurry of languages mentioned that no one mentioned Pascal. It's still alive and well. I've been using Pascal since 1987 (UCSD Pascal back then) but later switched over to Turbo Pascal. I now use Free Pascal which is open-source, cross-platform, and you do have the option of terminal mode or GUI programs if you use Lazarus with it. I also use Virtual Pascal (Win32 and OS/2). Both Free and Virtual Pascal can do OO programming. Let's not forget GNU Pascal also. While Pascal is not the "flavor du jour" of programming languages, it's served me well for all of these years. There's not too much I can't do with it -- granted, I don't write device drivers or such -- but it's a good structured language that might be of use to the OP for "personal use".

There's also the "side effect" of my learning how to read C from using Pascal. While I'm no C programmer, I can look at C or C++ source code and have a good general idea of what's going on.

Anyhow, just thought I'd toss those thoughts into the ring.

You are. It seems that you are not fully aware that it is human nature to categorize one's friends, family, and acquaintances. So Google+ is simply allowing you to do online what you naturally will do in your mind, consciously or not.

Who cares, really? It's just an ad. Your use of the Internet and especially the Web has long ago ratted you out and you are just now realizing it. :)

Hmm, isn't email a form of a electronic connection to another person? It's also kinda obvious you've not done much new product testing. If your program is going to bomb, it's best if it bombs on the least amount of people.

That's BS right there. I've connected my GMail account to Facebook, and now Google+, and have had that account "in the wild" for several years now with no problems such as spam, et cetera. My question to you is what type of "ruin" are you expecting?

You've already answered your own questions there it seems. You also seem rather anti-social and ignorant of the fact of simply having an email account opens you up to all sorts of problems. If you use logic, you can mitigate many of the problems with being on a social network or two. Your reasons for this seem rather illogical and more of a xenophobe than anything else. In closing: if you don't want to deal with the risks, don't get on the Internet.