A reader of my article sent me this note, pointing me to some relevant hot-off-the-presses work (reproduced with permission):

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A group recently evaluated the performance of Codex (and another model) on 18 programming languages:

https://nuprl.github.io/MultiPL-E/

The high-order bits are:

1. The latest and greatest Codex is now twice as good on its own benchmark suite than the original version published a year ago.

2. It's just as good on Python as it is on JS, Scala, C++, Swift, TypeScript... and other languages are not too far behind. It's not bad at bash of all things.

Paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.08227

> Here’s an approach that’ll work for sure: use some, let’s call them alternative, programming languages that Copilot doesn’t really know. (...) Sadly, I have news: Copilot’s love for programming languages knows no bounds! Racket! Haskell! ML! (...) Copilot is a ravenous beast: if any code in any language found its way into a GitHub repo, it’s already swallowed it up and is hungry for more, nom nom nom.

Not sure how true this is in practice - I only used Copilot once, with Python - but if it is that might invalidate this concept

This is another clear indicator that most students today see college as a higher class trade school, not as a place of higher learning.

College may have been a place of higher learning at some time before the last thirty years but I doubt it.

Javascript may be the only one of those four worth teaching as it has different patterns and different ways of solving the same problem.