Apart from Javascript. Ruby, Rust, Go, Kotlin and Scheme combined wouldn't equal to half the market Java has to offer.

thats the status quo fallacy.

You can get work in those other languages, nor is an understanding of Java a prerequisite for understanding how to use those other langs, etc.

how's javascript better than java in its design or elegance?

Well for one, it has a repl. As per single core performance, javascript is faster and has had first-class-functions from the beginning.

and you don't need 10 lines of code to print hello something to the screen.

and JavaScript(ES6) is actually multiparadigm.

don't get me wrong, JS has its warts (and oh my god that is indeed the case.) but you can literally run it in any browser any where, which makes for an excellent teaching aid.

Elegance isn't the first word I'd reach for when describing Java

> Well for one, it has a repl

Jshell

> As per single core performance, javascript is faster and has had first-class-functions from the beginning

Doubt. And no matter how I count, Java had first class functions for 8 years now, at the very least. Does it really matter when exactly did a language feature got implemented?

> and you don't need 10 lines of code to print hello something to the screen.

jshell: System.out.println(“hello world”)

> and JavaScript(ES6) is actually multiparadigm.

That hardly means anything. There are entirely FP libs available for Java.

Javascript is faster than java... sorry... the JVM is slow.

and ugly and verbose and all the things you mentions are bolted on after that fact or not even apart of the core programming language. which hurts your agreement of its being "elegant" or "designed well"

I would like to see some benchmarks on that. I like the V8 engine, it is also a marvelous engineering feet, but it is simply not made for the workloads that the JVM can routinely handle, like heap size up to terabytes. It’s not an accident that serious server applications usually run on top of the JVM.

Also, a JIT compiler written in Java running on top the JVM interpreting (though in a clever way) javascript can match the speed of V8, just saying. Look up TruffleJS!

i think you're referring to startup time not actual runtime of long running tasks

I think a well rounded course would touch all the popular paradigms, and logic.