[ken]

But why is the course “all about classes, getters and setters, inheritance and so on”? It sounds like a Java class before the language is even chosen. No wonder the best choice ends up being Java.

When I took CS in school, these were not the central themes. On the last day of class the teacher showed us a short program in this funky new language called “Java” and we all had a good laugh at how it tried to make everything about objects, even where it made no sense.

Even if you’re only trying to teach object-oriented programming, I can think of better languages.

[dagw]

I think it really depends on if you're teaching CS or programming. If I was designing a CS curriculum I would almost certainly start with something like Haskell, Lisp or Scheme. If I was designing a programming curriculum I would almost certainly start with Java, C# or Python.

At the end of the day your average programming job at your average company is “all about classes, getters and setters, inheritance and so on”, and if you want to prepare students for that, you should probably focus on that.