Maybe give Toit (toitlang.org) a try.

We have been working on it for a few years now, and it gets more and more complete. Recently Espressif started contributing as well (and added Toit to their esp-idf installer).

Some selling points of Toit:

* modern language

* very fast execution for a dynamic language. (more than 10x faster than micropython)

* consistent libraries.