Hi Scott,
I dabbled with FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC and and Pascal many years ago, then did quite a bit with VB and VBA later.
I found it quite difficult getting to grips with the C++ ‘punctuation’. All those semicolons, curly brackets and exclamation marks seemed very odd to me, but after persevering with it I finally feel reasonably comfortable.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen my ongoing Home Automation thread (more of a blog really). I use Blynk with Node-Red, which runs on a Pi and data is transferred between devices using MQTT messages. A slightly different approach to most people, but you’ll find that MQTT messaging is frequently used in HA systems.
Pete.