>>6
PHP would be a better language to learn; it's indeed simpler, although for console applications only; you don't want to confuse newbs with web-related stuff when they barely understand how a computer works.
>>8
The API is overgeneralized. You don't have to define the frigging Universe and descend from it; too much generalization translates to unproductive, slow, harder to read, boring ass coding.
One of the reasons why Java is slow is its pitiful API design. One of Java's (massively retarded) premises is that it won't modify objects like String, but rather, it'll destroy them and create a new one upon operations. That's why, when you benchmark Java doing, say, integers, it's pretty decent, and you may even say it's just some 30% slower than C; but when you want to do anything serious and will for example manipulate text, it becomes painfully slow, slower than PHP, Perl, etc.: if you use Strings, you're doing it wrong, and you'll see string operations like concatenation are O(n+m) or worse. To do it properly, you should know the API perfectly, which takes further time and suffering, as you'll see you'll have to use all sorts of streams and other crap just to get around this shitty design, making your program an absolutely blOOated hell that's both unproductive and hard to maintain.
The bottom line is, stay away from Java.
>>9
That's if you enter PHP; but "hello world" in a file gone through PHP will just print "hello world".
>>12
Exactly. At least, C++ has some of what Java lacks. I like C++ not because it's a perfect OO implementation, but because it covers two paradigms - OO C++ and structured C++--, which suits most problems best as you have to solve different problems, some which are inherently OO and some that are inherently non-OO, and this is where fully OO languages fail.
>>14
But its standard API today looks anything but ready for that.