“Godot's modularity, ease of development & distribution has led to it being adopted for non-game applications too”
Godot adopted for non-game applications.
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One of the leading contenders for being a modern equivalent IMO would be the Godot game engine. The Godot editor is less than 100MB to download for many platforms--the recent Godot 4 release also supports running the editor on the web[0] and on Android. Its packaging/distribution story for GUI-based applications is easier & stronger than any other modern programming environment of which I'm aware--in a large part due to the (IMO inspired ) architecture of using per-platform pre-built application templates/shells paired with per-project "data" files that contain assets & script byte code. Godot's modularity, ease of development & distribution has led to it being adopted for non-game applications too: "Apps & Tools - 2022 Showreel" < this video > I do think the initial "complexity of the programming" for an absolute beginner is probably still at least a little bit higher than drag-and-drop GUI environments like classic VB, REALbasic, VBA or Hypercard. (Primarily from a UI/UX point of view because Godot doesn't directly have the "drag button from toolbar" workflow which I think was key in earlier systems. But it is extremely modular by way of configuration & extension--one intended use case being e.g. specialized feature-subsetted tools for artists.) In my experience it also works really well for iterative development where you can just hack around (from visual & code perspectives) to get something working & then refine it (and using Godot's "Scenes" paradigm for encapsulation). An