[hiyou102]

At UBC CS a few years ago they made a switch in the opposite direction, from Java to Racket for their intro course. I think this was a very good decision because it allowed them to spend less time teaching syntax (which in racket is very simple) and more time focusing on fundamental topics such as graphs, recursion, functional programming, and test driven development. Compared to the equivalent intro programming course that was taught to engineers in C I think students in CS learned a lot more than the engineers whos most complicated curriculum involved arrays and procedure calls. What's interesting is that I believe the inspiration for teaching functional programming as an introduction came from MIT.

[wffurr]

The sheer amount of nonsensical boilerplate required in any Java program, even trivial ones, makes it a terrible language for teaching Computer Science.

Think about trying to teach the meaning of "public class Foo { public static void main(String[] args) { ... }}" to a complete novice. Class-based design, inheritance, visibility, return types, arrays, etc. all right off the bat. It's too much.

Scheme and Python both are much better choices for this alone.

[jksmith]

Some snarky drift: Then post-college commercial reality sets in, where using mind numbing boilerplate supported by frameworks and heavy ides (as opposed to libraries, custom or otherwise, and an editor), is SOP. Join the programming masses and literally think inside the box(es). So why did you go to college now?

[int_19h]

So that you can realize that you're inside a box, and leave it on those few opportunities that present themselves (and, perhaps, specifically seek out such opportunities).

[jonnycomputer]

One point of learning these is to learn the ability to learn new languages on your own.

I would have a semester teaching several "toy" languages in different paradigms: perhaps some kind of lisp, some kind of prolog, and some procedural language, followed by a second semester where students choose the language they want to learn, and they learn it by themselves.

[__Duncan__]

"Trust the natural recursion"