Java is a good tool. It arranges everything for you and you don’t have to worry about the details. For those who do want to know about the details, it is interesting to dig a little bit into it. However, perhaps I don’t have time for it now.
I tried Visual Basic when I was in middle school, but I didn’t really do anything nontrivial with it. Thanks to the university I attended for undergraduate courses, my first serious programming language was C. I am proud of this fact since in C you can handle many things in the hardware or OS level. You don’t have many shortcuts, which means you have to build it with your hand. That gave me much freedom to play with pointers to do things I could never imagine when I had to switch to Java when I was a Master student.