As most hardware engineers, I started off my computer science career by learning a sequential programming language. The first language I learned at the University of Oslo was Java. While it’s not considered to be the most exciting language today, at the time, Java was at the pinnacle of its popularity.
The engineers who built Java were trying to solve a number of issues which earlier languages were lacking in one blow. Perhaps a wise decision to do a fresh start instead of continuing down the C path and creating C+++.