I was at the tail end of the Java-first code teaching approach - the Stanford open courseware I was following in 2013 was largely built on top of Java. Stanford switched those courses to Javascript a couple of years later.

Java has definite advantages over its scripting cousins when it comes to learning the OOP paradigm, program patterns/anti-patterns and typing. You can't really get away with not knowing any of it in Java (as opposed to Python), but the language is still fairly newbie-friendly (as opposed to C++). Additionally, Java 8 is a fairly decent introduction to functional programming for people who've never worked with it before.

All that said, right now I wouldn't start a new codebase in Java unless I really, really had to. Learn your fundamentals through Java, then get comfortable in something else and code your projects in that instead.