Well I guess you can add 2 big schools to this, as I will also be using Java 1.5 next semester. I guess the thing you "professional programmers" don't realize is that we students in intro programming courses are generally not graduating this year. Most students taking intro programming now will not be in the "real world" (except for internships) for another 2 or 3 years. If we follow your logic completely then we should all be learning Fortran since some legacy programs are out there. My professor's general outlook is that the class is Intro to Object-Oriented Programming and Java just happens to be the best cross-platform language to teach it. In addition, he thinks that 1.5 adds some features that are useful to the concept of object-oriented programming, and will teach those in the second semester. Does that sound "crazy"? I don't think so. I'm sure Java 1.5 will be well established when I graduate . . . in 2006.
If you still think using Java 1.5 is stupid, then you must also think Apple is stupid since they release the Java 1.5 pre-release to developers. I just wish they would legal make it available for other. In addition the requirement of having to use Apple Tiger, to run Sun Tiger (Java 1.5 code name), just makes it more complicated to use a Mac since you need to somehow get the developer edition of Tiger (become a criminal and use BitTorrent) and then you need to make your system dual-bootable unless your crazy enough to use Tiger preview for all your work.
In the windows world you can have multiple Java versions installed and your IDE can choose which one to use, why can't Apple allow these choices. Is it really a technical hurdle or an attempt to get more money out of end users.
