"Touched the whole spectrum"? Hardly. What about logic programming languages (eg. Prolog), stack-based programming (eg. Forth), concurrent programming (eg. Erla

"Touched the whole spectrum"? Hardly. What about logic programming languages (eg. Prolog), stack-based programming (eg. Forth), concurrent programming (eg. Erlang)? And that's leaving out more esoteric ideas like FRP (Functional Reactive Programming), the funky type systems needed for efficient purely functional languages, and the less-well-known OO constructs (multimethods, metaobject protocols, etc). No CS curriculum can ever both touch the whole spectrum of what there is to offer and be reasonable to mandate for all students. Inevitably, some students will want the minimum necessary for practical work and others will want to explore as many avenues as possible. The importance is in striking a good balance: exposing students to enough different paradigms to produce good computer scientists without requiring so much that they never get enough real experience with specific languages to be good programmers.