I say, go back to basics - literally. There are still many "games BASIC" languages around. Some are attached to or reproduce retrocomputing environments like QB64, FreeBASIC and BASIC8(plus a plethora of modern BASICs that target old platforms, like Altirra BASIC, BasiEgaXorz, batari Basic), some are pretty modernized like Cerberus X and AOZ Studio. The thing they all have in common is that they get the tooling and deployment challenges out of the way pretty quickly, and they abstract out enough functionality into APIs that you can start doing flashy things quickly.
For writing a GUI app, look to Python and TK or wx. Those are not too awful to get started with(well, TK particularly, wx is cluttered with boilerplate). Or for a form-editor approach, Lazarus - the current open-source successor to the Pascal lineage.
That’s precisely why I’m building https://jmmv.github.io/endbasic :-)
Nowadays??
- Java swing: Java is pretty straightforward but I could never get the layouting engine to do what I wanted.
- .NET windows forms. Same as above except using c/c++/c#
- web development. The modern build pipeline with transpilation, gulp, nodeJS etc is way too complex. Perhaps plain HTML + plain CSS + plain JS would be possible to grasp by a kid.
- Android?? In theory we get an integrated entry into developing full stack applications in pretty much one language (Java / Kotlin) + some XML. The layouting is problematic again. Easy tings that can be done with visual editor + mouse are achievable. More custom layouts quickly enter into the same layouting engine magic we had in Swing, CSS.