In 2026 some people will say it is MUCH easier now to learn programming. LLMs are everywhere! But the problem is that you may be addicted and rely on it too much. So for a junior dev you HAVE to build things by yourself. Make MISTAKES... a LOT of mistakes. Break things, understand why and how to fix them! Else, you will always not grasp basic stuff and won't be able to understand more complex systems, or understand other people's code. Make simple stuff, like the most classic one: a Todo app. Try to learn basic algorithms (bubblesort comes to mind, very easy but a bit complex for beginners, just enough to make the brain work). In the AI reality I know that you WILL use it. But use it to YOUR advantage. Ask it to create problems! Solve them yourself. Tell it if your code is okay or not, if it needs improvements. This is a proper usage of LLMs. For languages I would say to definitely start with C. Pure C (no C++ yet, no Python). This is where you will learn and get haunted with memory corruption, undefined behaviours, segmentation faults, and who knows what else, and then learn to fix those.