Yeah I just disagree. I actually think Java is a terrible teaching language. Folks for whom Java is the closest they come to the hardware tend not to understand the internals of how computers actually work well enough to do things like understand where bits fit into bytes or what happens if you recast an int into a double without converting the underlying data.

Many times that doesn't matter, but to me it's important to have a supple and complete understanding of the underlying ideas. Java fails at that.

When I referred to memory I meant more than malloc and free. It's things like understanding how an array of ints is laid out in memory and what happens when you treat it as an array of chars instead. If you talk about this to a Java programmer, their eyes are likely to cross.