
Stanford dumps java as intro language - noahster11
https://www.neowin.net/news/stanford-university-dumps-java-as-an-introductory-programming-language
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aduffy
I've TA'd all of Stanford's intro programming classes, including the first
course in programming CS 106A, so a few things:

\- unlike a lot of other schools, CS 106A is mostly taken by non-majors
(90-something percent of undergrads take at least one CS course before
graduation, and for non-majors that means 106A)

\- the follow up course, 106B, is in C++ and focuses on OOP, pointers, memory,
data structures, etc.

\- 106J was crafted as a replacement for 106A by in JS. It had limited
enrollment, and word on the street is 106J's first offering this past spring
was an experiment and it didn't go all that well, so who's to say if it'll
still be around next year.

Maybe they should switch from Java to something hipster and trendy, but
there's about 10+ years worth of assignments that will need to be rewritten,
including autograding infrastructure for the 600-800 people who take it every
quarter.

I personally feel like JS is an awful language with few opinions or guard
rails, and thus a bad language to teach people who are looking for programming
principles. It works for the web but I think for a course almost entirely
consisting of non-majors it's not a good first language.

~~~
dx034
Thanks for the insight. With your experience, what would be a good language
for non-majors so that they can make use of their experience later? Python,
Go, C?

~~~
chii
I would definitely say Haskell. Second is python, but i feel Haskell teaches
concepts better and more efficiently. Everybody has used spreadsheets before,
and I think most people can draw a m mental link to spreadsheets with Haskell.

~~~
posterboy
That's completely out of the question at the moment. True, it could
potentially be most useful to know haskell for a lot of programmers, but at
the moment, the opportunities to use haskell in the work place are actually
rare and not to a small part because an understanding of haskell is barely
achievable in an introductory semester, while the steep learning-curve of the
language is kind of intended as it's usefulness only really plays out at a
higher complexity. Whereas, python has a focus on scripts, shortness and
quickness are even symbolized in it's name. Script languages with
introspection and reflection are best suited for REPL, especially with good
integrated documentation.

Javascript in the browser suffers at that because it's _opinionated_ towards
web, but OP sees that as a plus and web programming certainly is an applicable
skill with a future. Not everyone would have to use facebook as homepage, for
example

~~~
sn9
Haskell used to be the introductory language at UT Austin a few years ago
IIRC. So it's been done before.

The point of an introductory programming class is not to teach a language for
vocational purposes, but to teach the basics of computation. Someone who
understands computation can reasonably be expected to pick up most languages.

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xoroshiro
I'd say Python would've been the 'safe' and 'sane' choice, but maybe it's just
my bias against Java and JavaScript talking.

Just curious, has anyone ever heard off choosing to teach something like bash
/ PowerShell? It might seem less intimidating than downloading a lot of stuff
and students can play around with stuff already in their computer. Hell, maybe
even something like VBA (as much we might dislike it) since non-majors will
likely encounter it in MS Office anyway.

~~~
dx034
In the department I work, 5 people recently started using Python who never
wrote a line of code before (except some limited VBA).

While the coding itself was relatively smooth, we spent a majority of our time
consolidation which Python version works with which packages and how to create
code that can be executed by computers that use Python 2 vs Python 3. Some
people had to use packages that only worked with P2, others only worked with
P3.

There's still not really a solution for this. We'll probably just switch to
Julia once it gets enough support in areas we need..

So I disagree, Python is actually not a good language for beginners. The
language is great but the ecosystem can be extremely frustrating.

~~~
Doxin
The mistake here is not just making a choice but instead having people pick at
random. Hardly pythons fault, every programming language has multiple
incompatible versions.

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xaa
I went to a completely unranked school, not even a CS major. But took
Programming I anyway. It was for freshmen, and was in C++.

IMO, for an intro language, you need either something close to the metal, so
that students can work their way up the abstraction chain, or something very
high-level with flexible constructs if it's desired to teach things from the
algorithmic level.

I also think that any dynamically typed language is a bad choice for a first
language. We're all used to holding the types in our heads, but beginning
programmers don't even know what they are, and it's a really core construct.

~~~
jghn
Disagree, I think it is the exact opposite. I say that as someone who did
their CS education in the early 90s when that _was_ the case. We used C for
everything unless the class material implied something else. We got into the
down and dirty details quite fast.

IMO that's the wrong way to do it. Using myself as an example it took me far
longer to learn things like data structures than it should have. Why? Because
I still hadn't wrapped my head around pointers. The fact that the two are
coupled is an implementation detail IMO. It turned out that I never had a
problem understanding the structures, I had trouble writing code which didn't
segfault.

I'd prefer to see CS education start with the more theoretical constructs and
then start diving towards the metal as the basic concepts are known. In other
words, treat it more like computer science and less like computer engineering.

~~~
Koshkin
I keep hearing that people have (or had) trouble understanding pointers. As
someone who has never had that problem or met such a person, I am struggling
to understand why...

~~~
kronos29296
It's not so much as trouble with pointers as trouble with visualizing
algorithms and data structures. Try implementing some moderately complex one
in C. It reads like a monster. A dynamic language like Python would have a
simpler implementation but at the cost of performance (Why do beginners need
performance).

~~~
jghn
This is more or less what I was getting at. Do these things in a simplified
language first and then drop down

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rogocopH
I am really curious if this actually makes things better..Maybe I am just
getting old..

But this seems like everything else. Let's dumb it down so people can get it.
But if you really want to be a programmer, you will get it. You will spend
hours debugging and feeling like you know nothing. That is what makes you
grow.

On the other hand....I ran into some Senior CS students who were incapable of
programming in javascript...so...maybe it is not so bad.

~~~
xaa
I read this more as a nod to the fact that Stanford is the feeder school for
SV. And pretty much all SV churns out these days is webapps.

Javascript is just a very mediocre language in virtually every way. There is
only one thing it's good at, webapps, and it's only good at that by virtue of
the fact that it's the only game in town for complicated front-end stuff.

The only thing that could be said in Javascript's favor as a teaching language
is that it has basically no standard library, so teaching the entirety of the
language can be done quickly.

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z1mm32m4n
I'm sure I'm biased, but I'm a huge fan of how they taught our first two
semesters where I went to school. Semester 1 freshman year was imperative
programming in C (learning pointers, bits, the stack and heap, memory, ...).
Semester 2 was functional programming in SML (learning recursion, types,
function composition, formal reasoning, ...).

When it comes to other programming language features, there are few that can't
be understood as some combination of imperative and functional features.
Introducing them freshman year, students take these lessons with them to every
subsequent language they learn.

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danso
I teach at Stanford though not in CS. I think this headline is a bit off.
There is a CS 106J class that follows the CS 106A curriculum using JS instead
of Java, but as far as I know, the CS 106A Java curriculum has not been tossed
out for the academic calendar of 2017-2018 (syllabuses aren't up yet, so I
can't confirm).

As the article states, CS 106J was spearheaded by Professor Roberts this past
year. I would imagine it'd take some more time for it to become a curriculum
that all of the profs teach, though JS is being used in several other CS
classes. For example, CS 142: Web Applications, used to be taught with Rails:

[https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-
bin/cs142-winter14/inde...](https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-
bin/cs142-winter14/index.php)

Now it's taught with MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node):
[http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/info.html](http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs142/info.html)

------
charlie-r
Students who start by learning Java will learn solid principals which may be
applied to Javascript (or any other language).

Students who start by learning Javascript won't learn solid principals.

~~~
inimino
"Principles" not "principals".

Everything depends how the course is taught, not on the language used.

~~~
romanovcode
> Everything depends how the course is taught, not on the language used.

Usually this statements holds true, but not in this case. I mean, after all we
are talking about language where `'0' == false` is `true`.

~~~
inimino
Every language with loose typing has some edge cases.

Once students know that JS has type coercion, and how to avoid this entire
class of problems, they never need to know or think about what "0" == false
evaluates to.

------
edem
They could have chosen a thousand better languages for starters like Python or
Ruby to mention some useful ones or Scheme for example which has literally no
syntax. They chose an abomination instead. Now we'll have even more influx of
javascript-only coder hussars who have never seen an ecosystem which is not
rotten to the core. Congratulations.

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RandyRanderson
It's funnny how, when java first came out, everyone was writing applets and
not doing a good job of it (incl myself). This was due to it being way easier
to code and deploy as opposed to C/C++ at the time. This gave ppl the
impression that java was slow, when in fact the code was terrible (and ms was
constantly submarining sun).

Now I'm sitting here with 16GB of really terrible Javascript code running in
my browser using 5% constantly of the fastest intel chip you can buy today. No
one says it's slow probably because no one knows it's running.

If chrome and ff put a task in the process list with all the Javascript CPU
usage I'm guessing things would be way different.

I really do think K&R C should be taught to university level students. It's
important to understand pointers and mallocs, even if you don't use it often.

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Grazester
Javascript, really? Why not Python?

~~~
paulddraper
How could you pass up an opportunity to use npm, browersify and webpack?

~~~
droidist2
Compared to pip/pip3/conda/virtualenv, npm is very straightforward

~~~
paulddraper
Never heard of conda, and Python has been stable enough that I haven't (yet)
ever uses virtualenv.

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chobytes
Honestly dropping Java or C++ as intro languages is fine imo... But why not
something like Lisp, SML, or even Ruby...?

~~~
kronos29296
Or Haskell if you want to go the FP route while CL or Clojure for the Lisp. Or
python for dynamic (atleast more popular than Ruby which is more concentrated
on Rails ecosystem).

~~~
copperx
I don't like Python, but I have to admit that it ticks most of the boxes of an
ideal starter programming language, unlike CL, Clojure, other Lisps, Ruby, or
C/C++.

