I know my college's insistance on java as the first language that people learned (at first course 1 was psudocode, course 2 was java) put tons of people off. (This was a decade ago).<p>When they switched to scheme and python, people took it much better (especially media centric python).<p><a href="http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs1315" rel="nofollow">http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/cs1315</a><p>If you wish to follow along in their intro course.