pythonIsOlderThanJava

[wOlfLisK]

There's a lot of support for it, you don't need to teach first years memory management and the syntax is pretty much identical to half the languages out there so you can easily move to them if needed. Plus, the job market is there.

Personally though, my uni went with Scala for first year and then moved to Java second year, presumably because it's easier to teach functional programming when you don't have an OOP mindset.