is c++ too much for a beginner?

[Còbra!]

All I’m going to say here is in my experience, you learn one modern programming language you’ve learned them all

At least on a very basic level, modern languages work the same way. The only difference is sometimes the syntax is different. I just learned quirks like “Python/gdscript doesn’t include the ;”, or “C needs to specify the type of function you declare”

The only real difference I’ve noticed is Cpp has things like classes and inheritance, but honestly, I’ve never stumbled across a situation where I absolutely need those. I’m managing everything fine with what C has.

The biggest challenge I’m facing personally is that I’m learning how to program homebrew software for older consoles, so I’m going lower level and needing to do more and more myself.

So honestly, I wouldn’t worry about what programming language to start with. For modern tools they’re very very similar. I have a very easy time adapting depending on what a dev environment needs.

The challenge will come from eventually moving onto basic and assembly, as they are very different beasts but I’d cross that bridge when I get to it.

Basically, I’d instead be asking what the best game engine to start off with, since you want to do games. I started off with Unity, and then Godot, and now I’m learn how to code bare OpenGL/SDL.

[Dan Q]

All I’m going to say here is in my experience, you learn one modern programming language you’ve learned them all

This is broadly what I was trying to say, except also not! Modern programming languages can be divided by paradigm, e.g. into traditional procedural languages, object-oriented languages, and functional languages. It is absolutely true that learning one paradigm makes adapting to another language that uses the same paradigm... pretty easy!

Also: many modern languages are multi-paradigm! (Modern) JavaScript, for example, can be used in any of those three paradigms! It shows its bias as being originally a procedural language because the other two are optional but it's pretty hard to write no procedural code in a JavaScript application! But you can certainly mix-and-match.

But contrast that to e.g. Lisp, which is fundamentally a functional language... try learning Lisp if you've never done any functional programming before, and it... feels like a leap! Or try writing Smalltalk, which is strongly object-oriented, and you can't get away from needing to think in terms of classes and their instances.

The challenge will come from eventually moving onto basic and assembly, as they are very different beasts but I’d cross that bridge when I get to it.

BASIC was designed to be easy. That's why they called it BASIC! (A popular backronym for it is Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: I'm not certain whether it really was originally called that, but there's documentation going back all the way to 1964 that uses that name!)

So yeah; don't expect BASIC to be challenging. There's nothing fundamentally difficult about it! Many, but not all, dialects are pretty feature-poor compared to modern languages, though, so if you're used to being able to e.g. reverse an array with a single command or something, you'll find you have to implement your own tools for this! But as languages themselves, the BASIC family is very-deliberately very-easy.

Assembly can be challenging, though, because you get very few tools to help. Fortunately, almost nobody needs to write in Assembly any more, but it's a useful thing to learn because it (for the most part) maps one-to-one onto machine code, and so reading Assembly means you can interpret the output of any reverse-engineering tool, which is fascinating all by itself!