Survey on Adverse Effect of Sophisticated Integrated Development Environments on Beginning Programmers' Skillfulness

Integrated development environment as a software system that aids programmers in developing software applications quickly and effectively has been perceived to also serve as an inappropriate tool for beginning programmers when it is specially developed with some complex features. This complexity in features as perceived leaves the programmers with a double role of studying complexity found in the environment and the semantics with syntaxes of the concerned programming language. This paper categorizes few of the available integrated development environments based on program building tools that are integrated in them and also considers an experimental survey on their adverse effects on novice programmers by sampling programmers' opinions using closed ended questionnaires. The population was randomly selected from some tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The opinions were statistically analyzed using chi square and based on the analysis, beginning programmers learning strengths are found greatly influenced by the type of integrated development environment used.