I cut my teeth in the programming world with Perl, which is an awesome and I think pretty accessible language that will let you do most things pretty well. With that said, it does kind of disadvantage you as a first language (along with other high level interpreted langs) because it abstracts a lot of important concepts and manages them behind the scenes, so if later on you want to do something lower level, you still end up learning all that stuff.
I'd recommend C as a good starting point, but for me it was really hard to get my head around without a Computer Science background.
Enter Rust, which is usually what I recommend now, as basically C, but it tells you what you're doing wrong at compile time.
In regards to how to /actually/ get started, I'll echo the sentiments of others: write programs. Put another way, just start doing it.
Start small by writing something like a command line calculator or even smaller, like a program that takes two numbers a user inputs and adds them, and build from there. I'd also say that (for me) one of the most important things that helped me learn and stick with programming as to solve actual problems.
Just doing theoretical work is great for learning but got boring quickly for me. I wrote a program to help me manage my finances and over the years it's grown into an insanely large thing that's super messy, but I use it all the time and writing and maintaining it has taught me a lot. (Currently working on porting it into Rust and open sourcing it).
Good luck, hope this helps! Programming is some of the most fun you can have on a computer these days (IMHO), and you get to flex your keyboards!
