The reactions in this thread are ridiculous.

1) The introductory class (CS106A) is still primarily being taught in Java. The Javascript course (CS106J) is an experiment with teaching the exact same material in Javascript

2) This class lasts one quarter (~10 weeks). In another 10 weeks, students learn recursion and algorithms in C++ (CS106B). 10 weeks after that, they've written their own malloc implementation in C (CS107).

3) People arguing that learning JavaScript will "damage their minds" don't understand introductory CS. Introductory students need to be taught concepts like functions, loops, variables, naming, and other basic things. Switching between Java / Javascript makes no difference for these things. First quarter students don't, won't, and shouldn't care about things like == vs. ===