I also learned programming in college with TurboPascal and absolutely loved it. Learning Smalltalk was also a pleasure due to not only the beauty of its concept

I also learned programming in college with TurboPascal and absolutely loved it. Learning Smalltalk was also a pleasure due to not only the beauty of its concepts but also the development environment. The closest thing in Java for teaching the language is BlueJ, which gives the student a good intuition on the difference between class affordances (constructors, static methods and variables) and object affordances (instance methods) based on what's available when you right-click on them.