> it’s not all that much effort after the first two or three. There’s no reason to think the language you start with should be one that you could get paid to use.

Definitely!

This inspired me to list out languages I've learned to at least some minimal level and written programs in. Here they are, with the contexts in which I used them:

BASIC - middle school ;

Fortran - high school ;

C++ - self-taught & later some work;

Pascal - university;

Motorola 68k assembly - university;

Miranda - university (Programming Languages class only);

Ada - university (Programming Languages class only);

Lisp - university & work (CLOS);

sh - work;

ColdFusion - work;

bash - work and personal;

Java - work;

Atmel microcontroller assembly - hobby;

C - hobby (to replace Atmel assembly);

Ruby - work and hobby;

Scala - work;

Elixir - work;

Solidity - work;

Typescript - work and hobby;

Elm - work;

Clojure - work;

Javascript - work;

Python - hobby (with a tiny smattering of work usage over the years)