Also, don’t be too dissuaded by people criticising your choice of C++.

I think it’s a great language to learn two of the most fundamental aspects of programming; the object-oriented approach and managing your own memory.

If you made a career of programming, you’d almost certainly switch to a higher level (memory managed) language. In my experience, the people who started with C/C++ are the ones that immediately understand pass-by-value / pass-by-reference and can explain how garbage collection with reference counting works and how to break it!