As a geeky kid I started out teaching myself Basic, Pascal, C and Assembly using books and magazines in the early 1980s.
My first paid development job was around 1988/9 writing low level code (Assembly & C) to interface with hardware dongles to provide encryption and copy protection for a suite of software.
Since then I have gained experience using a variety of other languages including C++, Java, C#, Delphi (Visual Pascal!), Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python, Scala, Clojure & Golang. I was recently involved in a blockchain project and got some exposure to Solidity. I've had a varied career and have always been willing to try new things, picking up new languages has been part of the journey.
C was the first language that I truly loved and I particularly enjoyed the element of danger involved in writing the code because it was so powerful. The modern day languages are higher level and insulate developers a lot.
JavaScript and the NodeJS runtime environment was a great learning experience because it got me out of the OOP mindset and I started thinking about code architecture in a different way.
Clojure was an awesome language to learn, I had become somewhat familiar with functional programing paradigm using JavaScript but Clojure is on another level.
Python is a good starting point for a modern day first language. Its syntax is easy to follow and the standard library is very powerful. It doesn't have the enterprise level performance of Java and Scala but with modern day application architectures that's not really a handicap.
Programming languages are just tools to do a job. Familiarize your self with the programing paradigms and the design patterns because that will help you to ease the transition between languages. Every language and framework has its own quirks, recognizing and accepting them will allow you to write better code quicker. Use an API documentation viewer like [Login to see the link], [Login to see the link] or [Login to see the link] to help you.
If you want to get into web development then you have to learn JavaScript. React is the easiest of the front end frameworks to learn because it's only focused on the presentation layer. Knowing React also gives you a good jump off point for entering the realm of mobile development because React Native uses the same architecture.