The Pitfalls of Java as a First Programming Language

Because of its popularity in the context of Web applications and the ease with which beginners can produce graphical programs, Java has become the most widely used language in introductory programming courses. We consider this to be a misguided attempt to make programming more fun, perhaps in reaction to the drop in CS enrollments that followed the dot-com bust. What we observed at New York University is that the Java programming courses did not prepare our students for the first course in systems, much less for more advanced ones. Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging.

for full article go here http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/CrossTalk/2008/01/0801DewarSchonberg.html