Lemme tell you something, DO NOT learn BASIC as your first language. As a hobbyist, I avoided C/C++ for 25 years because I just didn't get pointers and memory manipulation, and messed around with other languages like JS and PHP instead (also BASIC's GOTO and GOSUB kinda ruined me as a programmer for a few years). But once it finally clicked a couple years ago, I now want to write EVERYTHING in C/C++.

I think plain C at least should be everybody's first language. It literally reprograms your brain to think exactly like how a computer internally functions. I never got that with other languages, because they were so far removed from the actual machine.

Edit: also, after learning some of it, it's pretty neat when you do stuff like look at parts of the Linux kernel source code and think "wow, I know what's actually happening here now!".