Stanford CS101 Adopts JavaScript

mikejuk writes "In case further proof were needed that JavaScript shall indeed inherit the earth, we have the news that Stanford has adopted JavaScript to teach CS101 — Introduction to Computing Principles: 'The essential ideas of computing via little phrases of JavaScript code.' You can even try it out for yourself at Stanford's course page."

Re:First programming course? At Stanford??

[Dahamma]

The summary is awful.

First, this isn't even recent news, it was added *last* year.

Second, this isn't an intro course for CS majors (or even any engineering major, or hell, even a non-engineering major interested in programming). It's basically a really high level intro to computers and "programming principles" for "fuzzies" with an irrational fear of computers (which as you say, is definitely a small group at Stanford).

Though the lecturer (Nick Parlante) is awesome, so it's probably a fun class, and might even get some people interested in taking the real intro to programming class (CS106A).

Re:Ideal IDE

[_0xd0ad]

Q) Can you tell me the difference between FIFO and LIFO?

Javascript arrays have push(), pop(), shift(), and unshift() methods. If they fail to teach FIFO and LIFO, they can't blame it on Javascript.

Re:Ideal IDE

[Anonymous Coward]

JS is indeed a bad language if you care at all about syntax or sanity.
Here's a couple from Stackoverflow [stackoverflow.com].

In JavaScript:
  '5' + 3 gives '53'

Whereas
  '5' - 3 gives 2

the following construct
return
{
        id : 1234,
        title : 'Tony the Pony'
};

is a syntax error due to the sneaky implicit semicolon insertion on the newline after return. The following works as you would expect though:
return {
        id : 1234,
        title : 'Tony the Pony'
};

Important: This is NOT their "Intro to CS" class

[comp.sci]

To clarify, this class is a cursory overview of how computers work, a few basics on whats makes them tick and how to make them do fun things. This class is meant as a general education "learn about computers" effort, this is NOT their intro to CS class. Look at CS106X for programming, CS103X for discrete math, ... To repeat: Stanford is NOT teaching CS majors javascript, they are showing off what computer can do for humanities students with CS101. On a side note: I can see why most commenters would not catch this but how did the editors miss this obvious fact? Do a tiny bit of background research (aka click their link) and you will see how this summary is entirely misleading.