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Comment by blahedo | Hacker News Reader

This is just bizarre: "Teachers planning to use Java are warned that many universities are considering dropping it from their first year computer science programmes, "as has happened in the US"."

There certainly are some places where Java is on the outs, but this makes it sound like US universities have entirely moved away from Java, which is completely untrue.

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Carnegie Mellon Universities new undergrad curriculum has no mandatory Java courses. The students will be able to learn Java, but will not be forced to.

In case you were curious, the intro class will be python, and then later classes will be ML and a new language that is a typesafe C (currently in development at CMU). After that, they'll learn C.

Of course, CMU is just one school, but it definitely represents a departure (and the lack of any mandatory OO-focused languages (yeah yeah, Python HAS classes, but you don't HAVE to use them) is weird).

Stanford still uses Java for the intro classes (as well as a number of grad AI classes - info retrieval, NLP, general game playing, and probably others I'm not thinking of). I don't see it getting replaced here for a while...too much starter code that no one wants to rewrite.

Once more, the legacy of marketing!

They warn about Java, yet their two most popular languages are Delphi and Visual Basic? Are those taught in universities at all!?

My alma mater just moved from C++ to Java in the last couple years. Not that I think it's a good decision, but yeah, that's hardly the case.

True, most of my courses are in Java although some teachers let us do our group projects in C++ if we wanted to.

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