I don't understand why university CS departments are trying so hard to be monolingual. Linguists are expected to learn at least two other languages besides their native language, and human languages are much harder to learn than programming languages. (It takes a typical linguist a couple of years to learn a language well enough to hold ordinary conversations. It takes a typical programmer a couple of months to learn a programming language well enough to write ordinary programs in it.) It seems to me that CS students should be expected to learn several programming languages, and to use them confidently. Particular classes would of course focus on particular languages, but it's strange to me why departments insist on only teaching one major language and then introduce one or two others in passing for a single semester and have students write only toy programs in them. CS students today ought to graduate with full competence in at least C, Java, and some "minority language" which is quite different from the Pascal/C camp like Lisp, Haskell, Erlang, Smalltalk, etc. They can go on to learn "industry" languages like PL/SQL, COBOL, Intercal, Fortran, et similia in the working world, and will have experience learning new languages quickly because of their education. And they'll naturally pick up Perl or Python or PHP or something because that's just what happens.