SUMMARY
The article reveals the conditions for choosing the programming environment as a means of teaching students of the general education school to programming in modern languages. The main conditions that influence the choice of the programming environment are determined: technical characteristics of computers and system requirements of the programming environment; availability of operating systems and additional software required for the functioning of the programming environment; functional of the programming environment; the interface of the programming environment; availability of documentation for the software environment; availability of educational and methodological support; level of competence of the teacher of computer science. The characteristics of the most common programming environments in C / C ++, C #, Java are analyzed. The selection of the programming environment for studying each of the specified programming languages is substantiated for the training of beginning programmers and students who have programming skills.