There are a few big reasons schools still teach Java primarily - adoption, scalability, and maturity. According to almost every Tiobe language survey, Java has been and is still either #1 or #2. It is pervasive in just about every enterprise IT environment throughout the entire world (whether you realize it or not), running on a ~billion devices and, now, Android phones as well.
Furthermore, it has very mature support for everything from GUIs (Swing) to web development (Servlet) to high-powered concurrency to advanced data structures. There are literally thousands of libraries and frameworks for every need and a wealth of talent and knowledge out there. Its performance is also orders of magnitude better than interpreted languages like PHP, Python or Ruby. It simply scales better in just about every way and is universally supported almost everywhere.
So, to summarize, for all the reasons listed above Java is the bread and butter of enterprise software. Personally, I prefer Python and C#, but Java is unavoidable if you want a good paying job or are serious about building a high-performance, platform-independent, scalable application.
Yes, but teaching java before graduation is different than teaching it first. You can get all the benefits you mentioned of learning Java even if it's the second or third language while using something nicer for the first one (python? Scheme? SML?).
Not so. Learning on an interpreted language is akin to learning how to fly a plane by simply riding in one. There is a lot to learn in a CS program, and it really requires a single language from start to finish. Python doesn't have some of the advanced capabilities and adoption of an enterprise-class language like Java. Believe me, I love Python - I've created a ton of apps with it, but I also have a CS degree and have seen the practicality of using a single language from start to finish.
How are you going to reinforce the notion of how a compiler works with an interpreted language? How would you teach and force the use of static types on a dynamically typed language? How would you teach true concurrency and thread safety with a language that is limited by a global interpreter lock (GIL)? These are introductory things a CS student would take in their first year.
I wrote my compiler in Python, and I know perfectly well what a compiler does.
It slows down development. :)
Pointer math and garbage collection are lessons better taught in C++, lessons about the stack make more sense in assembly, and it probably helps to learn about high level design patterns using a simple syntax (like Ruby or Python). Lisp, so I hear, teaches you pure enlightenment. We can play this game with any language we like.
Java, for its part, taught me a lot about installing a massive IDE and scouring pre-existing libraries full of absurd design decisions with nominal documentation. (To be fair, this is probably an enormously important lesson for working on large projects.)
Despite the fact none of these languages hits all of these notes, if we had to choose one, Java would be last on my list. Because in Java, there's a risk that you will never learn the most important thing about coding: that it can actually be fun.
> There is a lot to learn in a CS program, and it really requires a single language from start to finish.
Why would a CS program require one language from start to finish?! Wouldn't exposing students and researchers to as many languages and technologies as possible be the actual point? This is how you get people to come with new ideas, you expose them to as many existing ideas as possible, in as many forms and languages as possible... If I were to design a CS curriculum, language wise, I'd first expose people to Scheme via SICP, then push them from theory to practice with a language like Common Lisp and on a parallel track, more related to EE, move up from an idealized teaching-optimized assembly to real-assembly to C and then to very basic C++, then expose them to "engineery" concepts like OOP in two ways at the same time (the classic C++ way and the multiple-dispatch way in CL), and on a third more "pure CS" track have students choose any of the languages or techs from the other 2 tracks to solve the programming parts of the theoretical problems in this part - yeah, grading and teaching a class of such "polyglots" with their minds all over the map would be hell for any teachers, same as managing a research project with the same maddening diversity, but imho the people that are mentally equipped to handle such environments should be the ones teaching the new generations, not the ivory-tower one-problem-focused types.
Don't get me wrong, I'm against this new "hyperpoliglot wave" of using half a dozen languages in one project, but I'm against it in industry, and from a business perspective, because it wastes brainpower that can be put to other use and bring actual business value, but not in academia, because here the whole point is to explore everything, and you don't really have ugly time constraints and the need to provide "quality of service" assuring to real customers - something like a phd program lasts a few years and at it the end of you don't even have to provide a product that works in the real world (like support a certain load, not be littered with security exploits, be extendable to easily surpass or match the competition on new features etc.).
Maybe I have a weird way of looking at things, but the whole software universe seems upside down to me: academia / CS programs limit themselves to a very small number of technologies to use and problems to solve and this way they do very little "exploration of the problems' space", while the industry jumped into a madness of polyglot-everything way of doing things, with 100 choices of doing everything, none proven to work better for a particular case, and 90% of the time spend learning the tools instead of solving the problems. Shouldn't industry standardize and academia explore? Why are things the other way around in the IT world?
I did mention SML, which is a compiled language commonly regarded as an excellent language for writing compilers. I don't believe your analogy of interpreted languages being like riding a plane is accurate. If you want to be "closer to the metal" or whatever, start with C, or assembly. But actually, computational theory is done with Turing machines, which no one uses directly in real life, and lambda calculus, which is far closer to scheme than Java. Which is more appropriate for learning the deepest basics of programming?
As for using a single language, I really don't know. I'm self-taught so far. I can't imagine a good CS degree to not use multiple languages to some degree. Can you do everything from process scheduling to web dev with one language, and do it well?
Further, I'm not sure an "enterprise-class" language is appropriate for learning. Mybe it's just all the OO ceremony that bugs me. I was watching a friend try to explain some C++ code to some ostensibly interested but inexperienced people. He kept having to say "you'll learn what this does later, it just has to be there..." to stuff like includes, int main, type declarations. That's no way to learn. Java is better, but not much. "What's a class?" they ask on their first day. A distraction, mostly.
There is a lot to learn in a CS program, and it really requires a single language from start to finish.
There is really no single language that you can use to teach everything that a CS student needs to learn. A computer science education should teach concepts that transcend languages, and use whichever language is best suited to demonstrate the concept at hand.
Universities in the US don't teach languages in general. At my school, you get 1 semester of Java and that's it. The next class people take that uses something else is compilers, and that uses C. You're just expected to know it.
The usual justification is "we're not a vocational college" which I think is kind of bullshit.
Wait, is your take on this that their attitude is not good?
We got one quarter of C++, then everything else was "you are all grownups, use whatever the hell you want so long as it works on [cs cluster]". Most people continued to use C++ of course. It was not until an intro to languages course (preceding a few compilers courses, if you elected to take them) that course material again included learning a new language (scheme).
This, aside from the initial obnoxious first quarter, seems like the absolute proper way to run a CS department. A bunch of courses teaching different languages, as I would expect from some sort of "vocational college", is absolutely not what I was paying for.
It's not so much courses teaching languages, it's the lack of software engineering in general. There's one course here which is a joke and not taught until your second to last semester. And then people turn in absolute barf code in their homework.
Then people graduate and start a job, and they can't code their way out of paper bag, but they sure can write the tuple relational calculus for some given query.
Another example is my OS class. We just spent half a semester going over concurrency problems. Now we're rushing through everything else that goes on in an OS. We spent one day on filesystems and I/O. Not once have we said anything like "well this is how Linux or FreeBSD does it".
In college I was expected to know Scheme and Java, and C and some Assembly besides. I also picked up two other languages on my own time. I can't imagine even the least capable CS student graduating knowing only Java or only Scheme.
> You can then go and pick almost any other language.
Any CS student should be able to do that at least by their second year, regardless of what language they started off with. If colleges were not starting with Java there would be zero risk of students not knowing it if they needed it by the time they were ready to enter the workforce.
The AP (Advanced Placement Exam)^ is taught in Java. Before it was in Java it was in C++. A lot of schools had C++ intro courses because of this. When the AP switched most switched to Java. It isn't the right language in my opinion for an intro course but there you go.
^ an exam which offers college credit at most universities to high school students
This is a reasonable view, but I want to point out that Python and Ruby are strictly typed, just not statically typed. You must still understand primitive types and casting, in contrast to JavaScript or PHP, which are both loosely and dynamically typed (a frequently dangerous combination).
It's in the interest of the big companies. From what I know, some smaller schools like Harvey Mudd start off with other languages, like Scheme and Prolog.
IIRC, Harvey Mudd starts off with Python, in the intro class everyone takes. I just looked through their course listing, but I'm not 100% sure I'm thinking of the right class.