That's what people who've never done Java say.
Hey, at least Java is more OS Independent than so many other things. Or well, saying it like that makes it sound like a language feature; As someone else pointed out, something like Swift is technically platform agnostic too (though with no Windows compiler yet as far as I know?). So it's not so much about the language as it is the toolchain, compiled programs and whatnot.
But yeah, Java is great for platform agnosticism as long as you don't want it to feel or behave like a native app. But you can fairly easily get it to play nicely with more platform. The apple.laf for Java for instance is a good place to go (you write a boolean as true in the laf to get native menu bar support as an example)
I think Java is a great place to start actually. There's a tool called BlueJ for beginner programmers that has great visual aids for getting to terms with the idea of Objects and classes and such. You also don't need to worry about specifying a main and the like - you justs right-click a Class in a visual grid and you can run static methods or create an object that's placed on the so-called "Object Workbench" where you can right click objects to inspect state and run methods on them.
It's a really good tool for learning the basic concepts. Java being very explicit about object creation and the like in the code I'd also think would be advantagous for newcomers. Like the new keyword can be simpler to understand than .init or ClassName().
I think there are good reasons why Java is typically the first language taught at university.
For learning resources, there's also a brillant book called Objects First with Java which also references the aforementioned BlueJ coding environment (I don't really want to go as far as calling it an IDE...)
Inside Apple Development terminology however, I don't strictly speaking think it's correct to classify any program as "an app". I'd say that it's only an app if it extends UIApplication or NSApplication. Though that's more of a semantics thing, since you could also very well argue that if it performs a usable function it acts as an application.
In any case, I think Java is a good language for familiarising oneself with Object-Oriented programming concepts, but I wouldn't recommend it as a language in general. Maybe if multi-platform development is the target, but in that case I'd use Scala instead. It's a much nicer language in my opinion, and it runs on the JVM, so once compiled into ByteCode is essentially the same as Java.
If native development for Apple platforms is the goal, Swift is the best language to choose, but it's such a feature rich language that it may be too overwhelming for newcomers. I think Swift code is really easy to read, but to write Swift that interacts well with the SDK APIs you need to understand concepts like unwrapping optionals, using closures/lambdas, computed properties and so on. Even if you only write Swift in an Object Oriented style, the API you interact with may be aimed at a more functional approach or vice-versa, which I think can make the learning experience harder.
Whilst later versions of Java have a lot of these features too with lambdas in 1.8, optionals and generics in what? 1.6? and so on, a lot of the libraries are easier to work with without needing to understand very many of these concepts. The downside is that you're more likely to get a NullPointer exception because Optionals aren't more widely used, but the positive is that you'll get something running more quickly.
I also think the "strict" syntax of Java is beneficial to new coders. Getting used to remembering semi colons and the like. Then they can of course go on to start forgetting it again when they get used to Swift, Scala, Python or whatever, but it gives a better basis of understanding as to why the semi-colons may then sometimes be omitted in these other languages, and why the compiler might complain about ambiguotiy at other times when you don't break up your code in an expected way and the semi-colon would be necessary for the structure to be parsed correctly.
That's just my thoughts on the matter anyway
Oh, and once you've mastered all other languages, it's time to learn cock****. The most hardcore language - Or perhaps Arnold.
