While I can understand that they want to try to turn out students capable of handling the challenges and technologies of tomorrow, in doing so it sounds like they are forgetting that to see further (a la Sir Issac Newton), you must stand on the shoulders of giants.

In the RO (read-only) world of academia, perhaps a language may be "obsolete" because there are other languages designed to do the same thing, or because little can be learned from it that cannot be learned using another, but in the RW (real world) that I work (and have to get paid) in, a language is only obsolete when it is no longer useful (or no compiler or interpreter can be found for it).

(Also, had that been the prevailing attitude everywhere, I can only imagine how much more legacy COBOL code would have failed because no one could find that it was going to have problems when 01-01-00 came around, for instance.)

As to impossiblerobot's question in Re: Re: (OT) Where is programming headed? about the different types of languages, the best references I could find at hand were the language listing at http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc/lang-list.txt , and a page on programming languages at http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~marku/languages.html .

Update: Just so no one thinks I am speaking completely out of turn, for reference I do have a B.S. degree in computer science, although it has been a few years since I completed it, and I do think academic training and research in computer science does have purpose.