Last year I talked to a CS101 student at my uni, and she said she wasn't entirely happy about having to learn Java, but at least it would be useful to work on legacy code later in her career.
@leah LOL, I had to learn Java, Scheme and a bit of C. Don't use any of these languages at the moment. But that's not the point. The language is just a tool. Some are better in certain tasks but none of them (afaik) are good for all kind of tasks.