C++ & Lua for people like me?

["Patrick Mc(avery" <spell_gooder_now@...>]

Sorry for the flame war bait...... I need to make a decision and this 
list is an excellent resource.

I know other list members are using Lua and C++ but nearly everyone else 
on this list, appear to be professional day-coders(and bright ones at 
that). I just program when I can.

I have wanted to build a GUI app for some time and I have also been 
recently tempted by Pythons libraries. I know there are many GUI 
language bindings and GTK is C by default but it seems that C++ would 
open up lots of GUI doors(+ documentation) and other libraries doors 
too, it's just that C++ scares the hell out of me.

It seems that there are a lot of people calling it bloated and buggy and 
even professionals seem to stick to a subset because it's so big.

Would Lua allow me to stick to an even smaller subset? If so, do you 
have any recommendations about what parts of C++ to skim over and to use 
Lua for instead(like perhaps the string library?).

Thanks for reading-Patrick