[spacemanaki]

> it forces you to understand types.

If understanding types is so important, then why not go all the way and use either ML or Haskell, or at least Scala?

Most freshmen who stumble through a Java-school curriculum will not understand types at all, and based on confusion among a number of colleagues just yesterday (all Java programmers) about what a "sum type" is, it's clear to me that Java doesn't encourage developing a rigorous understanding of types, even for professional programmers.

[jfb]

Too, it's not a very interesting demonstration of OOP. Smalltalk or Ruby would be a more useful tool to use to teach OOP, iff teaching OOP is actually a goal.