[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.