My main complaint about Java as a pedagogical language is that it's just so big, with so many complexities around semantics, compilation, runtimes, etc. So my fear is you end up spending as much time learning Java as you do learning how to build software. I wouldn't choose C# or C++, either. My sense, from working with others who came out of CS programs that relied on Java, is that they end up only really knowing how to work in Java, and therefore only really knowing their way around the ways of solving problems that come most naturally in Java.
It could be my chauvinism speaking. I'll admit to having some. My CS program taught us three relatively small programming languages (Scheme first, followed by C, and then MIPS assembly) in the first year before introducing OOP in the second year. So we ended up getting exposure to a variety of programming paradigms and environments, and came away with a lot of tools in our belt, and a fairly deep understanding of programming language theory and paradigms. And I did eventually find myself settled in a Java shop. When I did, I found that within only a couple months I had already developed a deeper understanding of the language than colleagues who had spent their entire careers working in it. And I believe a lot of that is because I had enough background knowledge to distinguish between, "This is how programming is done," and, "This is how programming is done in Java."
Pass by reference / pass by value is so syntactically batshit insane in Java that it shouldn't even be considered as an intro language option.
And before someone points out that, actually-technically, Java is always pass by value, I will pre-retort that reference-as-value isn't an argument we should ever be having about an intro programming language.
Either teach a systems language with unambiguous pointers, or teach something that abstracts consistently.
The only problem here is using the term "reference" for reference variables. If you would say "these are pointers to objects, but you can't actually do any pointer arithmetic", this would be a non-issue. The pass by value is not the problem here.
C and Pascal and even C++ have a very simple model. An address of a variable is a pointer. You can actually understand how memory is layed out on hardware and why you would want to pass references or pointers instead of copying very large data structures.
It could be my chauvinism speaking. I'll admit to having some. My CS program taught us three relatively small programming languages (Scheme first, followed by C, and then MIPS assembly) in the first year before introducing OOP in the second year. So we ended up getting exposure to a variety of programming paradigms and environments, and came away with a lot of tools in our belt, and a fairly deep understanding of programming language theory and paradigms. And I did eventually find myself settled in a Java shop. When I did, I found that within only a couple months I had already developed a deeper understanding of the language than colleagues who had spent their entire careers working in it. And I believe a lot of that is because I had enough background knowledge to distinguish between, "This is how programming is done," and, "This is how programming is done in Java."