In the end, big universities realized that Java was a lousy language if used for introductory programming

CS 106A is Stanford University's prestigious introductory university course. The curriculum is publicly available on YouTube, introducing basic programming principles in the most accessible way for students. With the expectation that by the end of this course, the acquired knowledge will be the foundation for learning in-depth programming as well as learning new programming languages.

Since its inception, this course has been using the Java programming language, a popular language, of course, but it is also complicated and confusing and makes many students "stupid". Thankfully, Stanford finally noticed that badness and in CS 106A's "new version" of CS 106J, programming introductory language was changed to JavaScript.

According to Standford, CS 106J also includes documents like CS 106A but uses JavaScript instead of Java. Because JavaScript is the most popular language for building interactive websites.

1. What is JavaScript? Can the Internet exist without JavaScript?

The decision to remove Java is really smart, because any student who has studied Java has found that this is the harshest language I have to learn when I first started. Frankly, it was too terrible.

The first code when programming with Java will usually be:

class HelloWorld {
public static void main (String [] args) {
System.out.println ("Hello, world!");
}
}

Think back to the first day you learned programming, how scary is the above code?

Say "Mom !," what the hell is a "class"? "Public static void", what is all of this? or not?

Meanwhile, the above code if it turns to JavaScript is just like this:

alert ('Hello, world!');

It has been "much easier to dig", even if you don't know anything about programming, haven't written a single line of code in your life, just looking at you can understand what this code will do.

You no longer have to bear the pressure, immediate pressure, even knowing that you must face it first, but at least until you get used to programming, then, things like class, programming Functional orientation, object-oriented programming introduced is still not late.

Programming is an interesting subject, full of opportunities to be creative and can be the key for students to have a great career later. But when the first programming lesson was Java's cumbersome, cumbersome, confusing code, programming became a boring, dry, hard-to-swallow subject, discouraging and wanting to find a another field of study.

We cannot deny the prevalence of Java in practice, but it is gradually narrowing its coverage as an introductory language for programming.

In 2005, a survey of universities' introductory languages ​​was organized by Bernard Chalk from London South Bank University and Karen Fraser from Ulster. Nearly 60% of these universities use Java as the introductory language, 10% use C ++ and only 3% use Python.

That was a story of decades ago, now things are changing, Java is no longer the preferred introductory language.

According to Philip Guo's research on the 2014 ACM Computer Association website, Python is currently the world's most popular language for teaching computer science entry in the United States.

Eight of the top 10 computer science departments in the United States and 27 of the top 39 universities use Python to teach the basic principles of Computer Science. Other languages ​​on the list include MATLAB, C, C ++, Scheme, Scratch and of course Java . although it may soon be no longer used in the introductory course.

If you are considering choosing the first language when you step into programming, hopefully this article may help you. Also, which school you are attending and what programming language you are teaching, please share with us!

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