The reason I mentioned c# is because it feels like "if Java adopted new features at a decent rate" and these days pretty much all of it is MIT licensed. Coming

The reason I mentioned c# is because it feels like "if Java adopted new features at a decent rate" and these days pretty much all of it is MIT licensed. Coming from Java to c#, I found it much more ergonomic and productive mostly due to less boilerplate and more concise syntax sugar. There are several ways to compile it to native if you need to and it has great c/c++ ffi support, although if you're doing a lot with microcontrollers you'll end up writing c/c++ eventually. Luckily a lot of big langs (c/c++/c#/Java) have similar syntax and concepts since they all sort of started from c. I'd suggest waiting until you learn some java/c# before starting on c/c++, or instead starting at old school c (k&r c) or arduino c++. Modern c++ is a beast to learn.