Start with C. C++ is fine too. You don't need to 100% the language, a few months experience will be be handy for the rest of your computing career. It'll be a

Start with C. C++ is fine too. You don't need to 100% the language, a few months experience will be be handy for the rest of your computing career. It'll be a perfectly reasonable stepping stone for reading C++ without really needing to learn all the details to write it. As much as any language can be: C is still the lingua franca, a relative common denominator. As you explore different parts of the computing environment around you, you'll run into it constantly. Learning about python? C. Digging into how your program talks to the OS? glibc and the man pages and most examples will be C oriented. Any documentation ever explains how something is laid out in memory? It'll be explained in C structs. How function calls work? The assembly will be explained in terms of C code and C's calling convention. Any language's FFI? C. Digging into the JVM, browsers, Javascript? It's C++ but you'll know enough to eyeball the code. This is mostly about all the things you'll want to be able to read about well. Anything you'll want to know has been done in C or C++ — Nothing big exists that you'll want to explore is mostly written in Rust or Zig yet. And there are still things that can't reasonably be yet either (oversimplification).