It's a good question. I don't know if this is helpful, but: I dipped my toes in with Solidity and Ethereum on day one, and used Hardhat to help set up a local blockchain, dev environment, and test suite. I quickly found myself scratching my head about many of Solidity's language features (particularly some of its modifier keywords) and spent a bunch of time looking at opcodes at https://www.ethervm.io/ and the really solid technical documentation on https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/. Solana was next; it's a whole different ballgame. Luckily, I have some Rust under my belt, so my focus was primarily on writing programs and deploying them.

AFAIK only EVM(Ethereum VM) is popular and others are emulating it. You have Soldity there which is meh from my CS view. On frontend you use whatever you like and just bind via library to wallets.

EVM seems to be the hottest, because of early entrance with its own langauges. But WebAssembly in Cosmos, and Solana favors Rust as a programming language but afaik you can use any LLVM compatible. After that it is just a matter of connecting a client to a node, usually done in the browser.