[Lain]

During high school, my programming teacher only taught us C++, and she always told us that this language is the "foundation" or programming, and that if you know it, you will eventually know any other languages too. But in my opinion they're still a bit different, and also require a lot of practice.

What do you think? Which is the best programming language to learn first?

C++ is only foundational for OOP and learning how to use a compiler. Literally nothing else.

C is a lot more foundational in the sense that it follows a more procedural approach by default but you can also write it as a more functional style, not to mention the gcc is insanely optimized so it'll run ultra-fast. The tradeoff is that it's a very small language, so although memorizing it will take you an afternoon, it will take you much longer to write anything useful. Also, it's rather unsafe in the sense that it doesn't do garbage collection on its own, you can play with memory directly, and most standard library stuff doesn't do input sanitation, so you need to implement stuff like that yourself.

If I were going to recommend you a language to start off with, it would be a tie between C and Python. As mentioned, C will get you all the foundational knowledge you need (and when things break, you'll have to go lower-level to assembly and bytecode to figure out exactly why something went wrong.) You'll learn a lot more in the long-run.

As for Python, the only reason I really recommend it is that it's easy. It reads like English. It can be written in any style, really (procedural, functional, OO if you really want.) It can run decently fast, you usually don't need to f*** with interpreter options. There is a massive community for it too, so when it gets down to finding how to do something, there's a good chance the question has been asked on StackExchange, and there's also probably a library dedicated to doing that. You can write programs that work a lot faster, but the tradeoff is that you don't really learn about what goes on behind the scenes until you get to CPython and the native interface.