Java remains the most popular programming language, but few people would call it the coolest programming language. Some may even argue that it's an increasingly outdated language and, for that reason, many educators are reluctant to teach Java.

So that begs the question, should schools and universities still teach students Java programming? And, if not, which alternatives to Java are the most viable?

Reasons not to teach Java Is Java's decline a good thing or a bad thing? That depends on who you ask, of course. But, in general, there are good reasons to change how computer science programs teach Java and other programming languages in the early years of school. Java is verbose. Java programmers who are honest with themselves will admit that Java is a more verbose language than most in the sense that it takes a fair amount of code to achieve a simple task. Maybe that's okay if you're a professional programmer and can churn out code quickly. However, will a student trying to learn to program really want to have to write three or four lines of code just to print a single string into the terminal? Python, for instance, only requires a simple line of code: "echo 'my string';" Factor in learnability. You might argue that Java's status as the most widely used language means that everyone should learn it. After all, plenty of professional programmers use Java daily. Lots of important applications are written in Java and, even if everyone stopped writing new applications in Java, we'll no doubt be maintaining legacy Java codebases for decades. However, the fact that it is the most popular enterprise language and will remain widely used for a long time to come does not mean we should always teach Java to programming students first. If you're a new computer science student who wants exposure to the essentials of application design and development in a simple way, Java is not the best starting point. Java is a compiled language. That's good and well if you are a DevOps engineer building Java applications for a Jenkins pipeline. But if you just want to learn programming, it's not ideal to compile applications before you can test them. It's simpler to stick with a scripting language. You can learn about build processes and delivery pipelines later if that's where your career takes you. And you may not want or need to. Not everyone who takes an introductory computer science course is going to become a professional developer and compile code. There are alternatives to Java. One of the first rationales that you often hear for teaching Java is, "It's object-oriented!" It's true that Java is the poster child of object-oriented programming (OOP). Plenty of other languages, however, can be used for OOP. OOP is a concept and an architectural strategy more than it is a feature of specific languages. Plus, you can teach the principles of OOP with no specific language attached. OOP is a concept and an architectural strategy more than it is a feature of specific languages. Beyond this, the microservices trend is already making OOP less important. As microservices deployments do away with monoliths, OOP may not even matter for much longer. There's no standard Java Development Kit (JDK). Between Oracle JDK, OpenJDK and various vendor-supplied JDK platforms, things can get confusing. The nuances between different JDKs could mean that code you write for one platform won't work properly on another, which can frustrate students learning to program for the first time. You can try to control this challenge by requiring all of your students to use the same JDK, of course. But why not just avoid the issue altogether? Most other languages have just one standard implementation -- usually open source.