[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.

[dx034]

You assume that the course is for CS majors. For students who'll only have 1-2 CS courses in their life, teaching some practical skills could be the better choice.

[chii]

If that's the case, there's a good argument to be made about teaching automation of common tasks using bash or Perl, rather than JavaScript.