The age of Java as an introductory programming language in computing classes is coming to an end. This is good news to hundreds of students who have been traumatized with the complicated and clunky language.
In 2005, Karen Fraser from the University of Ulster and Bernard Chalk of the London South Bank University conducted a survey of different universities regarding the introductory programming language of their choice and a majority of them chose Java.
Despite this, however, many computer science beginners were terrified after they experienced how tedious and scary Java was. Many students recalled how they felt burdened after encountering words, such as static typing and object-oriented programming, during the first day of class. This has led many to switch to something that is less arduous or abandon computing totally.
One classic example to show how complicated Java is when writing the simple "Hello, world" message.
class HelloWorld {public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println("Hello, world!");}}
On the other hand, the Python equivalent for that is simply:
$ python helloworld.py
Hello World!
While in JavaScript, it's: alert('Hello, world!');
This should not be the case because programming is supposed to be fun.
In 2015, however, a new study emerged and declared that Java is no longer the introductory programming language used in universities but Python. According to the study, 80 percent of the computer science departments in the United States had adopted Python and used it as their programming language of choice in teaching introductory CS classes.
Some of the universities who were made an early shift to Python from Java in their CS introductory classes are Carnegie Mellon University, Caltech, University of Texas - Austin, MIT, and the University of California in Berkeley.
Recently, Stanford University has begun to offer a new version of their introductory computer course based on JavaScript.
