For example, back in 2001, Dijkstra expressed his dismay at Java replacing a different functional programming language, Haskell, in UT Austin's introductory programming course. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs...
Also consider that MIT used the Scheme version of SICP as their introductory programming textbook for years, and it remains a classic, but nowadays MIT leans into Python for introductory programming courses.
MIT Scheme is pretty much useless as a practical language, vastly less useful than Python. Python is infinitely more powerful to actually “make things”. But this is not the point of University!
The academic languages are powerful for learning, and it is a huge shame that they are being replaced with “professionally relevant” languages.
What's some evidence of this trend you can think of?
A decent theoretical model can be extrapolated from Goodhart's law. Graduates' performance on programming and leetcode-style interviews is a measure that many stakeholders care about, so it's a target for university departments that would lose value as a measure of educational quality. As a CS department optimizes its performance on that measure, elements of the curriculum are reprioritized. It becomes okay for the department to sacrifice educational quality in order to enhance performance on the measure. What doesn't go directly into the measure, such as experience outside of a core programming language intended for programming interviews, gets chipped away over the years through market pressures as universities' graduates compete for relative performance on the measure. This is a theoretical model, but to me it's convincing.
