It has to be Rust. I have experimented with many programming languages in the past. While they individually excel at some things, I found Rust takes the majority of what I look for in one language. Notable qualities that stood out to me were: cohesive tooling and ecosystem under Cargo, compile-time approach to address lifetime issues that I see a lot in languages that require manual memory management, and the willingness to move forward and experiment with new features (looking at you, C++ ABI compatibility). I would encourage everyone to try Rust at least once.

I have always been interested in problem solving with computers since I was a child. Admittedly, I did not know that I wanted to pursue in computer science professional at the time, but I kept learning as a hobby and eventually decided that I want to take computer science seriously. In the modern age, computer science is a necessary skill to grow my outlook into the skills required for the industry. In short, the stars aligned and I decided to pursue computer science professionally.