In Javascript it's either:

document.write("Hello, world");

or:

alert("Hello, world");

Two lines of overhead counting the script tags.

For all its faults (and they are many) I think I'd argue for Javascript as a first teaching language (maybe focusing on Crockford's "good parts", or maybe some variant like Coffeescript). Minimal overhead. Support for reasonably advanced concepts like objects and anonymous functions. Will run on just about any device the student (or his or her friends own) without having to install anything. Trivial to distribute your creations. Has actual employability value (this, I think, is sole reason Java has become so popular).

I don't want to get bogged down in the argument over strong/weak/dynamic/static typing -- but also don't think it's necessary for a beginning course.

The necessary HTML dings the number of unique things up so it's not quite that simple. But I like the idea of being able to easily share your creations, I started with PHP and a friend let me FTP files onto a subdomain he set up for me. I remember sharing a "99 bottles of beer" print-out with online friends when I learned about for loops. (I also remember spiking the server load by increasing the number into the billions...) I think a JS oriented programming class has as much merit as a Python one. We can discuss tradeoffs more (e.g. JS's style of OOP is superficially further from Java's than Python's is and AP culture still favors Java/C++ style OOP, which PHP is actually very similar to) but I think they're both better attractors into the field than Java.

Yep, it's definitely worthy of discussion IMO. Someone else apparently disagrees, since my post got modded down to -1. :-)

IIRC Code Academy teaches JavaScript with,

console.log("Hello World");