Learning to program is hard. Pedagogical tools are designed with the goal of helping people learn to program. The designers of these tools face conflicting goals: making it easier for students to start programing, and giving students enough information to ease the transition to a general-purpose language. Little data is available on the effect pedagogical tools have on the programmer who was introduced to programming through a teaching tool and then wants to transition to a general-purpose language. In particular, it is not clear how closely teaching languages should resemble general languages to best prepare those students. This research is a first step in addressing these issues. In this thesis, we present VisuaIJava (VJ), a multi-paradigm programming environment. We empirically investigate how VJ compares to the traditional approach to introducing programming and in particular how different language representations effect several factors that affect a programmer's transition success.