[jmlane]

Indeed.

As someone taking a data structures course in post-secondary school where the facilitation language is Java, I've struggled more with the Java development environment than I have with actually understanding the data structures and the implementations. Even the Java specific implementations are simple once you can get your package and classes playing nice and compiled to bytecode.

This is not a slam on Java, just an observation from personal experience that some interpreted languages like Ruby and Python tend to make it easier to do casual programming exercises or tasks than those needing any compiling prior to execution, such as C, C++, and Java.