[dalke]

"newer, trendy languages"

Python is 25 years old.

Remember, all of those "old" languages, when they became notable or influential, were younger than Python is now.

Scheme, when SICP was written, was only 15 years old. It was young and trendy at the time.

C was less than 20 years old when I learned is as part of a required course for my CS degree. I've no doubt that part of the reason was that it was widely used in industry.

C++ was the trendy thing by the time I left school. It was less than 10 years old.

Perl was 10-15 years old when it was used as the "Swiss Army chainsaw" for a lot of the first era of web development.

While this appears to solidify your observation that software engineering is very trend-following, I listed them to point out that Python seems to be the oldest language when it made the jump. It's surely older than most of the students and even TAs for the course.

[kedean]

Python has been a common teaching language for at least a decade now, it's just that this particular course has now switched to it as well. Still took 15 years for it to get that momentum, though.

You won't see a CS course taught in Go or Rust anytime soon.

[steveklabnik]

There actually have been a few CS courses taught in Rust. http://rust-class.org/ was a few years back, but http://cis198-2016s.github.io/ is being taught at Penn and http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~achampion/teaching/plc/lecture... is being taught at the University of Iowa _right now_.