I may be in the minority here on hacker news, but I think Java is a great language. It was intuitive for me to learn, and it is highly extensible/customizable.

I may be in the minority here on hacker news, but I think Java is a great language. It was intuitive for me to learn, and it is highly extensible/customizable. Telling college kids to learn javascript first is a terrible idea. Teach them a static language first. Anybody who knows what they're doing in a static language will have no trouble picking up non-static languages like javascript.