The title is bit clickbaity: the article is mostly about Stanford's intro course. It's also misleading. Educators have known for a while that Java is not a good language for introductory education. The Greenfoot project attempted to work around some of its limitations, while other curriculums like How to Design Programs (using Racket in an environment designed for teaching) have used entirely different---and in my opinion much better---approaches.

The thing that seems to get skipped in these discusses is that curriculum is hugely important. I believe it's more important than language choice, though a good language for teaching certainly helps.

My own teaching is very much influenced by How to Design Programs. I think this paper is pretty good: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/jfp2004-fffk.pdf