My personal experience as professor (programming, mechatronics) is that if you have previous programming experience and you are aware of concepts as OOP, it is better to go for C/C++. The arduino language is really great for beginners, but have some limitations (e.g. you must have all your files in the same folder). And it is basically a simplification of C/C++ (you can practically copy&paste arduino code to a C/C++ file, and it will work). Also it makes sense that you can go and use a full well known IDE as eclipse:
http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/Eclipse
Initially it is required a bit more of setup and configuration of your dev environment, but IMHO it is worth it for programmers with experience in any other language.