<p>The point and use of a programming language is to describe computations to the computer. There exist many programming languages, just like there are many natural languages.</p>
<p>The point of programming languages in college is to teach programming language paradigms and how we tell the computer to do certain things. Because there are many languages, it doesn’t matter which one we use (although they express things slightly differently), therefore “Java vs C++” is an irrelevant question, those are just two popular programming languages (out of many). And contrary to natural languages, the computer understands all programming languages, so any programming language can be used.</p>
<p>Besides, Java or C++ (mostly Java) is usually the one that gets introduced in the introductory classes. When those classes have been cleared, people that were learning their first programming language are prepared to adopt to other programming languages, so any programming language that’s “taught” definitely doesn’t stick, it’s just used for demonstration.</p>