Program Languages

If you really want to make a bigger project, where performance is essential, you should directly go for Visual Studio C++ with something like SFML. (2d projects like a grand strategy game or some application with visual user interface....)

SFML ("Simple and Fast Multimedia Library") is just a library which simplifies the loading and displaying of textures, sprites etc., but also for the mouse and keyboard events, sounds, text display etc.

Do not loose time with some temporary solutions (C++ is the mightest and fastest coding language and the fun factor will be much higher, because you can ultimately reuse everything what you will have learned for any future projects.

The learning curve will be steep at the beginning (because of the foreign concepts) but after some time you will see that everything is repeating (that's where you should optimize your code for not loosing the overview) and it is super easy.

Mostly you will need some variables, classes/functions, STL containers, conditions and loops and some sfml specific stuff for the visual output (text,colors,textures,sprites......)

Most problems will be finding a good concept or vision for your project (what should the application/game do), keeping the overview over the bulk of code (which you can hide :-) ) and fighting with some small glitches (mostly typos like a missing semicolon, bracket, some misspelled variable or some flawed calculations).

The console will be always your friend for outputting and rechecking the steps in your calculations.

If you want to go for the 3d route, then it's even easier as you have tools like Unreal Engine which doesn't need any real coding.