Embedded firmware, probably C/C++/Rust. Not the answer you want to hear, but these are the languages for bare metal applications. Of course, if you are just using an Arduino/Pi, just use their SDK for their hardware on whichever language they support.
Those two fields are just not very friendly towards beginners in general.
It was designed as a teaching language for academics to stop writing bad code, but now I just get LLMs to do research/science for me with it for fun.
It depends. If you're a teen I'm mentoring, you're probably starting with some Scratch to drive Lego robots around. Then on to Python to drive the same robots around but now with more fun!. Probably because you absolutely couldn't stand the standard line follower solution of jittering back and forth and you sniffed out the existence of better control loops you cannot realize in Scratch. If you're on the FIRST Robotics team you're probably doing Java or Python, mainly because that's just what we've geared up for (and this is really the core theme for me at least: at introductory levels, what really matters most is whatever is most readily accessible to you and whatever kit you already have).
If you're doing your own stuff and you're a newbie with absolutely no opinions on where you started or what you were trying to do, you'd probably start poking around with an Arduino or similar, so you could write MicroPython (it's Python but you squint your eyes a bit!) or C. There's so many great kits for beginners.
In the context of my comment: what I meant is that you wouldn't decide, "the professionals do it in C++, C, or Rust, so we'll start with one of those." I'm going to give you a recorder (Python) before I hand you bagpipes (C++).
Once you learn that Brian Harvey, one of the two main designers of Snap!, was one of the principle people behind Berkeley Logo (which itself was a variant of Lisp, though that wasn't clear to me when I was learning Logo at age eight), it all starts to become clear. Snap! is itself nearly a Lisp, just lacking macros (and Brian Harvey is trying to figure out how to add a macro system to Snap!, with the primary challenge being making it comprehensible in graphical-blocks form).