[rch]

Someone recently described academia as 'Java vocational training'[1].

I'd expect Go to replace Java in the academic context relatively quickly, which should precipitate a shift in business' center of gravity over time. I already suggest Go to people who are serious about learning.

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[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

[rtaycher]

Why would you expect go to replace java in an academic setting? Java is only partly taught due to introductory simplicity and mostly taught due to it ubiquity.

[supersillyus]

Personally, I'd be surprised if Go replaced Java in academic contexts. Java has inertia, marketability, better cross-platform support, and bundled GUI stuff. That said, were I teaching a general programming and/or data structures course, I'd probably strongly consider using Go. It is possible and not unreasonable for students to read and understand the whole Go spec. The language is simple and orthogonal enough that I think students could start seeing past the language and to the tasks at hand rather quickly.