Holy fucking faggy shit. My AP Comp Sci class was C++. I can't believe they are teaching fucking Java.
One of the goals of AP Comp Sci was to learn OOP.
Few of you faggots realize that C++ is not an object oriented language. It provides object oriented language extensions to C. You need to implement the OOP yourself.
For a basic example, when you create an instance of an object and then need to pass it to another scope the object needs to maintain its identity (and yes, I realize there are edge cases here where that is not always true). You need to pass some reference mechanism of that object instance to the new scope.
Java is a pass by value language. All variables are passed to a new scope using their value. C++ is the same way.
Except, all object variables in Java are pointers to the object instance. So you pass the value of the pointer for the object, not the value of the object itself to the new scope. You never use the lagnauge to work directly with the object value.
C++, not being oriented to maintaining object identity, passes the value of the object to the new scope.
Example:
In C++ if you declare an instance of a House class and then pass that variable to the Paint method of some other object, a new House will be built, painted and then destroyed. That of course would be a fucking wasteful and faggy thing to do. So you use some extra C++ syntax to pass a pointer or reference to your House and then you can Paint the actual House you are working with etc. House has maintained its identity.
In C++ you learn OOP because you have to implement it yourself. You can also learn evil OOP like multiple inheritance.
In Java, the details are mostly implemented for you. Learning OOP starting with Java does not reinforce those basic concepts.
Also, 90% the science part that you are supposed to learn is already implemented in the standard Java libraries. So learning how to do that shit in Java is pretty fucking stupid because a real computer scientist already implemented it, and I bet they did a better job (sometimes with Java though we can't always be too sure).
From a computer science perspective, Java is too complete to teach comp sci. From a practical perspective its to shitty to teach anyone.