Objective C is as easy to learn as Python. It has C and C-- beat nine ways from Sunday, too. I plan on using ObjC for any personal C-family programming I need to do in the future.
Now, the caveat: in order for ObjC to be truly useful, you need to install the GNUstep libraries. This gives you collection classes, string classes, etc. I do not know how cross-platform GNUstep is, but I'm sure that's easy to check.