Essentially, there is a tug of war going on. Traditional CS programs were very much math oriented. There was a healthy dose of computing theory at the core of every decent CS program. The problem was that CS programs did a poor job of communicating why that core theory piece was important and students left the programs because those classes were difficult.

Now the schools are turning out CS grads who can’t reason properly about algorithm or data-structure efficiency and only know how to write simple programs that do simple things. The net result is a population of CS grads who don’t measure up to the challenges of modern CS problems.

Java isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom of a higher-ed effort to appeal to students’ desire to gain practical and marketable skills for employment. Unfortunately, this is doing everyone a disservice. CS programs should be able to provide both.

The language debate may never settle down.