What Does Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Mean?
An Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is an application that facilitates application development. In general, an IDE is a graphical user interface (GUI)-based workbench designed to aid a developer in building software applications with an integrated environment combined with all the required tools at hand.
Techopedia Explains Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
The concept of IDE evolved from simple command based software which was not as useful as menu-driven software. Modern IDEs are mostly used in the context of visual programming, where applications are quickly created by moving programming building blocks or code nodes that generate flowchart and structure diagrams, which are compiled or interpreted.