It may cause future problems, but things like Visual Basic with the graphical interface are very easy for a child to understand (or at least me). As the artifacts that you are interacting with in the GUI are in the programming environment.
This is true IMO. However you don't need to understand what the IDE is doing to use it now do you? A new user needs to learn nothing more than how to use the project creation wizard, and hit the play/stop button button.
As someone who teaches high school children how to program I assure you from experience and an IDE is much, much simpler than diving into the terminal.
This example requires the user to be able to do the following that an IDE would not:
- copy paste a file path to the terminal
- cd [pasted filepath]
- make [file name]
- ./[filename]
http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ex1.html
Versus throwing them into a black box where they are overwhelmed with buttons and gizmos and are encouraged to give up on the idea that they will ever know what's going on. Do you honestly think it's not worth the time to teach students how to use the terminal?
Oh, you're on Windows (like 90+% of normal computer users), well there's this thing called Mingw, or you can use Cygwin, which you use in this thing called a command-prompt, which you've probably never used before. Oh, and make sure you have your PATH environmental variables setup correctly. What's an environmental variable?
It's all turtles. Much easier to open Visual Studio, add a project, type out a main method, and hit compile & run. It's a shame QBasic isn't around by default anymore, limited as it was. Which, come to think of it, was a stripped-down, basic IDE.