Anecdotally, at my university (graduated 2013 so still a recent experience), a lot of CS students took the intro to programming course. In fact, it was (and still is) a requirement for a BS in CS at the school. The only way you could get out of it was if you had taken AP CS in high school and passed the test for the credits.

A large majority of my CS friends in that class had all been programming for either a little bit or quite some time, and the class was mostly a joke for them. Lectures were optional, and a bunch of friends (including myself) only attended three classes the entire semester: the first class (where we found out we didn't need to go to class except for tests) and the mid term and final.

Of course on the other side of things, I had friends who had never programmed before and found the course grueling and struggled to pass.

Similar experience in my two first-year Matlab classes in mechanical engineering.

I TA for this class. The class is optional for non-engineering majors but has enrollment >= 700 people per quarter. So many people at Stanford take the class that it's a bit of a cultural phenomenon.

There are three "intro" programming classes at Stanford. CS106A is "intro to java", CS106B is "intro to C++", CS106X is CS106A + CS106B + a bit more in one quarter. People who already know how to program are encouraged to take one of the latter two, although there is always a contingent of people with /some/ background in 106A.

For non-engineering people, Java seems like a slightly odd choice, is it not? So much overhead in learning, plus overhead if they did want to integrate coding into their lives in a light way. Why not Racket or a scripting language? As much as it pains me, even JS might be of better use.

Or is it just the case that these people just wanna take one course from the "real" CS for a non-coding reason?

Because the assignments, section material, grading infrastructure, handouts, teacher training material, and institutional knowledge for this class are all built around Java when the class switched over in the early 2000s. In the past, couple years the process of changing just one assignment out of the six or seven assignments was difficult for everyone involved (teaching staff and students). Changing the entire class would require monumental effort, and it would have to be driven by a majority contingent of the half dozen professors / lecturers involved in the introductory CS community at Stanford.

Given that the class has been successful at teaching programming methodology to tens of thousands of beginner students over the past decade there's no pressing need to restructure the entire course, even though everyone does acknowledge that Python or some other language could be better for new students. It's basically like any other large software project, yeah it could be rewritten from scratch and modernized to make small gains, but if it ain't broke, why fix it, especially when the professors and TAs have other projects that have far more interest in, like this paper.

Also one thing that many people don't know is that CS106A actually changes the language environment as well as providing a modified version of Eclipse to remove some of the less useful overhead in Java (for example removing main, and the beginner confusion surrounding keyword static, arrays and arguments). Also there's a much simpler introductory class called CS105/101 that uses Python.

Source: I taught sections and managed the TAs for the introductory classes over the course of four years while I was a student at Stanford.

I think the best language to teach as an intro to coding for non-engineering, non-compsci folks would be python or maybe ruby.