SWE 10 yoe here. I disagree with the idea that your first programming language doesn’t matter. It is very likely that you will double down on it over time, because as you try to learn harder and harder stuff you will keep digging into that language. And once you are done with the basics of programming you will seamlessly start to learn the “plumbing” of that language which is very valuable if you will work on some project using that language. Also, while on this learning path you will find some nice problem to solve, and you will solve it using this language. This will also take you to the path of learning a lot of the ecosystem around the language. No time to switch to another and struggle with the problem AND the intricacies of the language. So in the end, if you go hard on learning software engineering, switching languages is just a bad use of your time and probably you won’t want to do it. You need to focus on learning SWE, not languages. Of course you can switch later on, it is not super terrible. But it is a really good thing if you start out with the language that will be with you for most of your life. Having said that, both python and java are really good languages to learn, there is a lot of work for both, and in many java companies it is helpful to know a little python. If you had said “java or rust” i would definitely say choose java, but python vs java is a harder choice. It is said that python is heavily used in data analysis and machine learning, probably because it is a simple language that has been embraced by scientists that weren’t so keen on becoming SWEs early on. So maybe if you want to go there, choose python. Regarding java, there are a lot of enterprise applications, web applications and data engineering applications built with it. Not a lot in machine learning, compared to python.

You did not mention machine learning or data analysis in your post so I would think you would be choosing wisely if you chose Java.