Programming

It's a great language to learn. The memory safety specifically. If you only use memory safe languages, you won't know anything about how the memory is handled in the background. Start breaking and abusing memory, it's the best way to learn why memory safety is important, what it's doing different, and how it's prevented.

Getting deep in the trenches with memory allocation is the best way to learn, since all memory safe languages do this as well, they just hide it. It's extremely useful to know what's going on behind the scenes and is fundamental knowledge that applies to all programming languages, past and present, no matter how much they hide it.

If you can write correct C++ you'll be able to write Rust code that compiles first time. Don't stress, you're learning the good stuff.

There will be plenty of jobs in c++ in the foreseeable future, so it's not a bad language to know from that perspective. I don't know if it's the most pedagogical language to learn otoh, python is a better language for getting comfortable with the basics, c is better when it comes to learning a (slightly wrong but close enough) mental model of how a computer works under the hood, and there are many better languages to learn if you want to learn good approaches to thinking about problems.

Maybe you are leaning c++ because you want to work on something specific that c++ is primarily used in, and in that case go ahead with that project. I think having something tangible that you want to work on is great when it comes to learning programing and that's worth more than picking the "best" language. Besides, you can always learn different languages later in your career if you want/have to.

So how fucked am I for starting to learn cpp as my first language, or is this a later down the road thing to worry about?

I don't see why you should be concerned, except that no professional software developer is limited to use one specific programming language.

Even if you pay attention to the disaster prophets in the crowd, which are mainly comprised of fanboys implicitly and explicitly promoting their pet language/frameworks, C++ dominates all aspects of the computing ecosystem, which means that in the very least the whole world needs to maintain existing C++ projects to continue to work. See COBOL for reference.

Ah that's an easy one - what would you like to do?

My first uh... "language" was bourne shell. Not because I thought it was a cool language, but because that's what let me do things I wanted to do at the time: automate heaps of Linux, BSD stuff.

There are heaps of libraries and applications where C++ is the choice e.g. video games. My friend is great at Javascript because he loves web browser tech.

Don't stress - have fun! :)