The best program to begin game programming:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
    return 0;
}

Personally I'd say if your doing it in school, learn the language they're going to be teaching. From my experience it's been pretty awesome.

I found out before I entered my 1st Semester Freshman year that my first class was going to be learning the basics of C++. So I switched from Learning C# and Unity to C++. When my semester started a couple of weeks later, everything since then has been a joke, and the teacher has had no problem with me programming or reading books ( I tend to just sit there and read something like Game Programming Patterns, or Game Coding Complete off Amazon Cloud Reader during class, since all of the examples she makes us program takes all of 5 seconds to do.

The sad thing looking back at it, finals week is approaching and this entire semester has been the equivalent of about 2 hours of youtube videos. If that.

I just like this route cause since I'm in class it's a solid 1.5 hours of me programming whatever I want, or reading without any distractions such as playing video games or whatever.