I think the sins of Java as a first language are twofold:
1. The obvious excess incidental complexity
2. and more important, the enterprisey culture that's much less compatible with the intellectual curiosity, looking under the hood, etc attitude that's needed to become a decent programmer.
In collage, CS101 and 102 required me to learn and use JAVA, which I felt was a huge step backwards in usability and a lot of excess typing.
But as I reflect on it now, I think my feeling were because I came from knowing how to do some things and therefore not requiring the framework that JAVA offed to first time programmers.