[Alex3917]

A bunch of their courses (including their algorithms courses) are in Java, which makes me skeptical of how good their taste is. It's a strong red flag that they're just licensing content without any understand of the actual content matter and the quality of what they're teaching. I could be wrong, but that's definitely the impression I get based on both the fact that they're using Java and the classes are structured like traditional university classes, since not only are most university classes really mediocre (at best), but it also shows that they aren't taking advantage of the power of the platform/medium. Again, another red flag for poor taste.

[lawnchair_larry]

Your reply is hilariously naive and insane. Have you even looked at it? It's Stanford professors, who also teach Stanford versions of the same courses.

Andrew Ng, director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence lab, also the associate professor teaching "CS229: Machine Learning" and "CS221: AI" himself teaches the Coursera Machine Learning class.

Alex Aiken[1] teaches compilers. Tim Roughgarden[2][3] teaches the algorithms class.

And you are going to say they have poor taste and are just licensing content that they don't understand?

Java being one of Google's 3 official languages must be a red flag of their poor understanding and taste too I suppose :)

[1] http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/

[2] http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4934147&srt=all&#3...

[3] http://soe.stanford.edu/research/surreal.htm

[alexott]

NLP class allows Java or Python - this is because they need to provide framework to perform auxiliary task, and students are required to fill only needed parts - specific algorithms, etc.

[guiambros]

Coursera is pretty language neutral. I did Algo I and used Python. Other students used C, C++, Java. And when I did Machine Learning the recommended language was Octave/Matlab (but you could use Python if you know what you're doing).

[huherto]

That is not true. I took the DAA class and you could choose your own language. I used Python.

[Alex3917]

Ahh good call. I'm pretty sure the course description used to say java, so maybe the changed it once the course started?

[joshz]

Robert Sedgewick's algo class is Java specific.