I played flash games as a kid on Newgrounds. There was an option to submit your own flash games and that made me curious as to how they were made. I searched tutorials on how to make flash games and that was my start.
Eventually I got interested in making programs outside of Flash. Still being a kid, I wanted to be the coolest programmer/hacker ever so I learned C (the only language hackers use) and intalled linux (the OS for hackers). I mostly use Python now since I can get projects done much faster.
It doesn’t matter what language you start with. Just learn the core concepts around loops, if statements, data types, data structures, object-oriented programing vs functional programming. Those concepts span across all languages and once you know them you can just google “how to splice string in (language here)” when you’re using a different language. C is great if you also want to learn how computers manage data and how data structures work from first principles, since in C you need to manage memory yourself and it doesn’t come with any advanced data structures built in so you’ll need to implement them yourself.
I now mostly use my programming knowledge for hobby stuff. I automate tasks, do programming challenges, and mod games.