I learned assembly in high school, and programmed my first FRC machine in NBASIC (a variant of BASIC built specifically for the robot controller back in the day that, among its other delightful quirks, had if statements that were only allowed to be followed by a label and no else clause).

Java is "fine" in the sense that NBASIC was "fine." There's definite room for improvement in matching the abstraction to the problem domain.