[maxbond]

It's a lot easier to appreciate Java when it isn't your first language. I think it's really important for new programmers to have a streamlined experience to their first magical moment with programming, when they understand they can do cool stuff and succeed by being persistent. ("Streamlined" may be overstating it, there will be lots of friction along the way, but it should be caused by bugs they introduced themselves and overcome by debugging, not by tangential or environmental factors.)

There's a lot of context and drudgery involved in programming that can dissuade people before they get to that magical moment, and they can blame themselves and think they weren't smart enough because they don't understand that the deck was stacked against them. For instance with Python, broken virtual environments can be really dissuading for new programmers.

I think Java's opinionated and verbose nature can be cumbersome to beginners, who have never debugged a type confusion issue and so don't give a hoot about static typing. But I think after programming in Python for a while, they'll see why eg declaring what exceptions you'll raise is tremendously helpful.