Coincidentally years of industry experience really doesn't mean a thing when it comes to educating others. In fact, in many ways, the further you are from being a beginner, often it's hard to even relate to what being a beginner was like. It generally just means you know your stuff.. Nothing about your ability to teach others.
This implies that being a developer for any length of time erodes your ability to help others learn your craft, and therefore my insistence to learn C++, the industry-wide standard language of game development, is bad advice to give someone who wants a career in game dev. This assertion lacks logic. It is also insulting to aspiring students that they must be too stupid to learn to code a for-loop in C++ before they've done it in PHP or something first.
Before my current job I spent three years teaching programming students, and in my spare time today I still make C++ tutorials for beginners with overwhelmingly good reviews. C++ was my first language too, so I know very well the struggles of learning it. Learning an "easier" language first won't make it easier to learn C++, and in my teaching experience, more often than not encourages bad coding habits that you'll have to unlearn once you start using a real language like C/C++.
So back to the OP, if you want to make games, in a nutshell you'll need to know C++ and linear algebra. There's much more to it than that, but that's where you start.
You don't downvote because you disagree by the way.
Yes, I know the irony in down voting you here. that said, I do believe your advice is overwhelmingly bad.
As you said yourself, you know the struggles of starting with C++. So why the hell would you inflict that on other people?
The rules of teaching are pretty we'll entrenched at this point. You should focus on as narrow a field of study as possible, structure lessons so the learner feels accomplishment, and build on those accomplishments.
With C++, in addition to having to learn to program, the user also has to learn a 20 year old linking system, a language with a completely ineffable inheritance system and more rules than most legal codes, a build cycle that certainly doesn't support experimentation (non REPL), in a language which is a mashup of 4 prior languages.
It is not insulting to a student to managing their learning curve, in fact, it's the signs of a good teacher. Every skill has a natural progression of difficulty, programming is no different. Properly managing that progression is the key to efficient learning. Yes, a student can learn starting with C++, it's simply not efficient.
Compare and contrast teaching a for loop ( your example ) in say... Lua or JavaScript vs C++.
In Lua or JavaScript, you explain how to enter code, feed it in for evaluation and most importantly, you explain how the code works.
Now do the same for C++... Now you have to explain... The compile link cycle, #include, namespaces, main, scope, bracket operators, etc.
Now take that example to something like drawing a sprite on screen with Lua vs C++
One is a two step process, the other is about 20, only one of which is about code. So yes, you will learn faster if you learn in a more beginner friendly language, you will also be more likely to stick with programming I you see initial success. And yes, if you know programming concepts already, when you do decide to learn C++ the process will be faster.
