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A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.

And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.

OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.

Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.

Comments
  • 2
    Other screenshot as promised
  • 8
    I like where this is going. "Even though to the layman the difference is-.."
    Laymen don't go to Stanford, moron.
    I wish everyone would get over their collective boner.js. You just know this all started when some "full-stack JS dev" walked in and started tooting his own horn.
  • 7
    They should have gone with python or hell even kotlin. Not fucking JavaScript
  • 1
    @demiko Thank you!
  • 3
    @AlgoRythm Java is messy so teachers can instill the value of design and writing clean code rather than creating huge messes that are hard to maintain, change, and looks more like they're written by monkeys...

    But I guess the reason they're professors and why the textbooks they write look so bad is because they ARE monkeys.
  • 6
    Why is it considered a bad thing you start with a hard language? Am I the only one who took an "Intro to CS" course that was specifically designed to weed out those who don't have the right mindset for this industry? At one point we celebrated that this wasn't a field for everyone... Now, I have co-workers who take an hour to figure out a lambda statement that's nothing more than a foreach that increments a collection of integers by one.
  • 1
    @RevThwack it's because society wants political correctness: Everyone can do anything!

    So you can't call other people idiots... especially if they pay you or know people in high places.
  • 4
    My school started with C++. Day three: "This is a pointer. I will laugh when you botch it. Also no string class, only dynamic character arrays." I am so grateful it made me aware of what is going on
  • 7
    This bull crap with easing people into programming as slowly as possible really makes me mad. I dare the writer to name one other subject that does this. Do you learn art by drawing a stick figure the first day, or learn cooking by making toast the first week? And, I mean, seriously, I just can't get over the comparison of two hello friggin world programs. Sure, maybe it is confusing at first, but that's assuming a teacher has no clue how to teach. After not half an hour can most of the things be explained, and, after that, it's smooth sailing. No language has ever been considered better because it was shorter and easier to learn, and had rules that bend like water.
  • 2
    @SpencerBeige yea... If a 6 year old can teach himself VB from a book... I don't understand how a 16 year old can't learn Java with an overly paid professor...
  • 3
    @billgates I agree completely. There is no human on this Earth with an IQ above 75 that cannot easily pick up a tutorial from YouTube, udemy, etc. And learn at least its basics.
  • 0
    @Letmecode Yeah, but you're missing the point. I'm not comparing the languages for use, I'm comparing them as an introduction language to programming. JavaScript is the most likely, because of it's structure, to cause terrible habits and misconceptions of how programming actually works. I love JavaScript and use it all the time.
  • 1
    @LicensedCrime language doesn't matter really for school. The basics are the same. Everything else is just sugar or magic but if you're learning, you really shouldn't be learning magic.

    Just look how far those religious beliefs got us in the last 2000 years vs learning how things actually work.
  • 0
    Agreed, JS is a good language but it doesn't shield you from your own mistakes so pretty easy to go wrong when your new.
    On the other hand you can do lots of good stuff easily with JS so learning it feels really rewarding. Just got to watch out for the bad parts :D
  • 0
    @RevThwack Into Into CS is often an elective class that even non-CS majors take.

    With that being said, to all the non-CS fuckwads who are taking the one fucking section of it at my University, go fucking fuck yourself. Fuck you. You little shits, some of us are CS majors who would LOVE to take the class for a purpose other than a class filler.
  • 1
    C, with pointers and recursion and malloc and everything. It's not meant to be finger painting.
  • 0
    @demiko Its hard to learn because of all these rules and restrictions, java has. On the other hand u see, how clear code should look like and how its supposed to work and thats because java is a fcking good introduction for beginners.
  • 0
    Fuck it all and make everyone learn Lisp.

    Joking, obviously joking.

    But seriously fuck Java, I don't think it's a good first language.

    My first university language was C, but that was good cos there wasn't any object oriented bullshit shoehorned into it. It was step by step introduction and it wasn't until our second year that programming paradigms were explained.

    Starting with Java has you have to learn the basics of object orientation as well as fundamental principles and that's a barrier.

    I've been working with Java for five years and while there are some good things like static typing and the JVM is a good target java itself as a language is painful to write, too verbose.

    Students would be better served to learn something like python or c first and introduce java or anything language which forces object orientation or functional paradigms later when a student has an understanding of the basics.
  • 2
    I feel like most of your points about JavaScript would’ve been valid about 5 years ago, but since then and with the onset of ES6 JavaScript has become a much better language. You can do everything Java can do if you use something like NodeJs, heck you can even create bindings to C code which opens up a whole world of possibilities.

    JavaScript’s tooling can’t be beat, if you want static typings you’ve got them through typescript or flow, and it really is just better than Java overall.

    Java is a dinosaur and deserves to die 🙃
  • 0
    @dev0urer I dont think I'll ever see a proper 3D game ever written in nodejs. And I think that multi threading in nodejs is a real hassle that makes it so people don't want to do it. And then when a single thread is doing multiple users (say web app) if it crashes for one user it crashes for all of them. That just seems like bad design.
  • 0
    @tankerkiller125 Idk, WebGL is coming a long way. I’ve seen some pretty cool things made with it. Java games tend to suck and be pretty buggy anyway, at least in my experience (with the one exception being minecraft). I’m not saying JavaScript can do everything, but I feel like it is a better language than Java over all
  • 0
    @tankerkiller125 Isn't JavaScript a single threaded language with an event loop? How is multithreading done in JavaScript?
  • 0
    @nmunro you basically can't. You can (with nodejs at least) create child processes that run different code. But it's not going to work anywhere near as well as proper multithreading
  • 0
    @tankerkiller125 That sounds like you're try to use the language in a way it was never designed to be used...
  • 0
    @nmunro I dont use the language because of this lacking feature.
  • 1
    @tankerkiller125 Well JavaScript is what it is. Single threaded. It's not a bad language for not having threads.

    As for you not thinking there will ever be a good nodejs game, i think there might be, maybe there won't be though. Time will tell, at some point in the future one of us will be right and I really hope we both have better things to be doing with our lives to think back to an online difference of opinion with a complete stranger.
  • 0
    What the fuck even is this. Java is SUCH a simple language compared to ALL other programming languages (not scripting languages). Fucking hell if you students can't understand what a class is or the importance of the type of a value then they should stay the fuck away from programming
  • 0
  • 0
    @AlgoRythm No? I thought this wasn't such a weird opinion... Java really ain't that hard. Sure it's not easy but if you want easy keep away from programming in general
  • 1
    @12bitfloat I think you've lost sense of what it's like to know absolutely no programming at all. Java is easy once you understand what programming is but it has way too many advanced concepts. Beginners need to understand the idea of programming before they get into classes and OOP and all that. Any Java course will tell you to just ignore the setup (the class, the string[] args, etc) until later on when they get to it. Languages like Python don't have this stuff, which ends up just being "magic" until the advanced parts of the course.
  • 0
    @AlgoRythm I think you're right
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