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The title is bit clickbaity: the article is mostly about Stanford's intro course. It's also misleading. Educators have known for a while that Java is not a good

The title is bit clickbaity: the article is mostly about Stanford's intro course. It's also misleading. Educators have known for a while that Java is not a good language for introductory education. The Greenfoot project attempted to work around some of its limitations, while other curriculums like How to Design Programs (using Racket in an environment designed for teaching) have used entirely different---and in my opinion much better---approaches. The thing that seems to get skipped in these discusses is that curriculum is hugely important. I believe it's more important than language choice, though a good language for teaching certainly helps. My own teaching is very much influenced by How to Design Programs. I think this paper is pretty good: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf

TheApexTheater 10y ago
On that note, the size of the courses are not even comparable. If you look at "Explore Courses", a website that gives information on Stanford's course offerings per quarter, you see a massive disparity between CS106A (the intro course almost all CS majors take if they have no programming experience) and CS 106J (The new course). The "A" course, taught in Java, currently has about 560 people in it, while the Javascript course has about 40. (Source: https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filter-coursestatus-Active=on&page=0&catalog=&academicYear=&q=CS106&collapse= https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filt... ) I agree that Java may not be the best language to teach to beginning programmers, but to suggest there's been a wide move away from Java (as this article does) sort of oversells the situation, in my opinion.