I belonged to the generation that graduated into the rising dotcom boom. Around that time, lots of universities taught C++ as the first serious language. (Some still started with Pascal.)
The main thing a lot of had going for us was 5-10 years of experience with Basic, Pascal and other languages before anyone tried to teach us C++. Those who came in truly unprepared often struggled quite badly.
I did. Though a few years earlier I had attended a class where Pascal was used (however, it was not the main topic, it was about robotics). C++ was what I learned first in a "real" computer science class. In later years, we did move to Java. And I initially hated Java :D but ended up making a career using it.
Java in the 2000's was a poor language, but after Java 8, it has become decent and I would say the latest version, Java 25, is a pretty good language.
This thread is about Zig though! I want to like Zig but it has many annoyances... just the other day I learned that you must not print to stdout in a unit test (or any code being unit tested!) as that simply hangs the test runner. No error, no warning, it just hangs. WTF who thinks that's ok?!
But I think Zig is really getting better with time, like Java did and perhaps as slowly. Some stdlib APIs used to suck terribly but they got greatly improved in Zig 0.15 (http, file IO and the whole Writergate thing), so I don't know, I guess Zig may become a really good language given some more time, perhaps a couple of years?!
I learned C++ first. Like many I wanted to make games so I started programming before high school. I think our first high school classes were also in C++ tbf.
