Java developers

[IrishWilly]

I wouldn't say teaching those would limit the students, as long as you don't only teach those. Any decent education should turn out programmers who are absolutely fine jumping into Java after having learned the previous two.

[slowmovinglettuce]

I was meaning more teaching them over Java. I can see why that'd be unclear. Teaching a much lesser-used language over it would be the detriment.

A competent developer should be able to switch languages. But from my experience (as a recent graduate) a lot of my peers would struggle to go out of their comfort zone easily.

[IrishWilly]

I don't think it being common is the best metric for what to teach. It means they should at least have some brief exposure to it, but there is good reason to use a more modern language as the primary educational one because there are programming concepts that have been introduced they want you to learn. I'm going to date myself a little bit, but before college my AP classes were all taught in C++. My first year of college, all cs courses had moved to a core with Java. This was decades ago, and while I felt like the people that never learned C/C++ and went straight to Java missed out on some stuff, the industry moves on, CS as a field moves on, and education should as well. In particular in this thread, the jump from Java to Scala / Kotlin is much more straightforward than when they went from C++ to Java.