"If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away much of the physical machine. The abstractions can be peeled away in later courses."
I don't know that Java does this all the much better than C. The problem with C for a beginning student isn't so much that you have to manage memory manually--it generally takes a few weeks to even get to malloc() in a C-based introductory course--but that C gets in your way with explicit typing, #includes, etc. Java does away with some of that but introduces its own OO scaffolding to get in your way too. Instead of having to write main()s and #include's, the Java student has to enclose their functions in a class and so forth. Let's compare Hello World in C, Java, and C#.
C:
#include
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, World!\n");
return 0;
}
Java:
class HelloWorldApp
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the string
}
}
C#:
class Hello
{
static void Main()
{
System.Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
}
}
The Java and C# examples are even more cluttered than the C example when it comes to superfluous tokens: it has a class declaration, the method signature is more unnecessarily elaborate, and the print command has like three levels of object-drilldown in it. When you get to the simple procedural programs that a beginning student will write, this mysterious crud remains unresolved for longer. It's not enough to explain typing as you would in C or Pascal, but you have to talk about object-oriented programming before you get into problems complex enough to justify that level of abstraction.
If you really want an abstract language to enforce algorithmic thinking, pick one that doesn't have all that extra mental burden when you first approach it.
Perl 5.8
print "Hello World!\n"
Perl 5.10
say "Hello World!"
Python
print "Hello World!"
Ruby
print "Hello World!"
The cool thing is that these languages still
have subroutines and classes and so forth, but they don't
force you to declare a class, declare a subroutine, and call an object method just to code "hello world".
Java has advantages over C. These advantages don't include "letting beginning programmers focus on algorithmic thinking by using high level abstractions". Java's higher level than C in that it protects you from naked pointers and lets you do OOP, but that's not the type of high-level abstraction that helps a beginning programmer, especially not when it comes at the cost of forcing them to put everything in classes and methods.
If those who construct the curriculum want the beginning courses to focus on algorithmic thinking, I think it's fair to use a language that abstracts away as much as possible. We have no shortage of good interpreted languages to accomplish this.