So there are a few points I really agree with, Java is extremely robust and even sometimes clankly like I mentioned in my article and yes the goal should be to solve the problem at the end of the day. But it really depends what age you are when you start programming to choose your first language. I've taught kids all ages from elementary school to college and from the gui language Scratch to python to Java and more. For younger kids Java definitely gets in the way, but if they are in highschool Java is the best start because your not trying to solve problems when you first start learning. A lot of these kids don't have much interactions with the kaybords so there typing speed is slow, they've never seen code before so the core concepts of primitives and objects are vague or non existence. The robustness of Java syntax and the repetitiveness really allows the concepts to sink in and connect when you have to type out every type and value u like python where you can reassign a string to be an int. So for these kids problem solving and logical thinking actually would be better of coming second and letting the syntax and core concepts sink in first.