I agree with you - so teach both Java (for OOP) and Haskell (for FP). But I do find Java a perfect candidate for teaching about “traditional” development, where students get the benefit of static typing with easy to digest error messages (not that much runtime failure in specific circumstances that is really hard to debug as a beginner), well-defined behavior all-around (okay, not with regards to concurrency but that’s another topic — but not having your program segfault is very useful), understanding lower level memory details is in my opinion easier tacked on knowledge of a higher level language, so GC is a great start, and all around an easy/small language where the language primitives can be built upon in basically every other language.