I'm looking for a easy way to introduce programming to my kids. In my time Pascal was the way to do it. There was an integrated IDE, one click build, simple syntax, ways to output text and graphics. User interface / forms had to be built from scratch though. Interfacing with mouse meant using interrupts.

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.