He was very approachable and friendly when I was toying with game development in Go.
I should get back to finishing that game in Ebiten. The tooling alone puts a smile on my face.
C++ is probably a must if you one writes large games and/or performance critical ones (regarding "high performance"/low level languages, Rust libraries are immature).
Scripting languages (e.g. Python/PyGame) can be a good (quick) way to start and experiment. But readability falls very quickly when complexity grows (e.g. difficult to interpret inheritance tree), so at some point one may easily feel the need to switch to a statically typed language.
Regarding algorithms, a very common beginners book is "Game Programming Patterns", which is also available for free in HTML: https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/contents.html.
Naturally if you aren't looking into getting into the industry, rather having fun at coding games, anything that can do graphics and sound will do.
Nice to see Hoshi's work shared here.
The author also explicitly stated that he did not expect major work to upgrade to a new Go version in https://ebiten.org/blog/native_compiling_for_nintendo_switch....