I'd suggest you start with Python. It's widely used in the ML/AI community and in computational biology so the libraries and documentation are quite good. I'm a

I'd suggest you start with Python. It's widely used in the ML/AI community and in computational biology so the libraries and documentation are quite good. I'm a big fan of Ruby but it's got a lot of catching up to do here. I'd leave C++ alone for the time being. Once you've explored the concepts in a simpler, higher-level language you can start to think about making them fast.