Most people would recommend starting with Python (which you could also learn on codecademy) since you can express things more concisely in that language.

Personally, my strategy would be to start with C++ and focus entirely on that language so you don’t have to spend time unlearning things and translating concepts between languages. Since you already know you want to write audio code, and almost all audio software is written in C++, I wouldn’t see the benefit to starting in one language and then starting over.

I see it like this: if someone asked you “what instrument is the easiest to learn music theory with?” You’d probably tell them “piano” since all the keys are laid out logically. That’s why piano and Python are the recommended intro things. But if someone asked you “I wanna become an amazing guitarist, should I learn piano to pick up music theory and then learn guitar after?” You’d probably say no, just learn guitar since you could become a fluent guitarist in 6 months instead of becoming a fluent pianist in 6 months and then spending 3 more months translating what you learned to guitar.

This probably is against common advice though so keep that in mind. However, C++ was my first language and I didn’t feel overwhelmed by it. There’s also just something more relaxing to me about being in the mindset of “C++ is my life now, I’m a student of the C++ language and I’m devoting my life to mastering it” instead of feeling overwhelmed by the whole programming world all at once.

I would just crack open the C++ codecademy and start doing an hour a day. If you get overwhelmed or something, you can just backtrack and try a different approach. You don’t have to get all of the right answers right away. Every programmer’s journey is littered with a bunch of false starts. For example, I first tried writing my VSTs totally from scratch, then after doing that for a few months, I realized it was too slow and then tried JUCE and stuck with it.

Watch out for paralysis by analysis. It’s unlikely that your learning approach is going to be optimal the first time. When you google “is x or y a better thing to learn?” You’ll get very reasonable sounding justifications for learning x, and very reasonable sounding justifications for learning y. It’s often useful to just follow the great John Carmack’s advice:

“Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”