I agree that university education shouldn't be vocational training, but CS graduates need good programming skills. Computer science is very useful stuff, with a

I agree that university education shouldn't be vocational training, but CS graduates need good programming skills. Computer science is very useful stuff, with a lot of applications in the Real World, and just because there are subfields in CS that don't have any obvious application, that doesn't mean that CS folks shouldn't at least try to be useful. Have a look sometime at Simon Peyton-Jones' Haskell-related papers: they're pretty far removed from grunting-in-the-dirt Java monkeying or hacking up a quick Perl script, but they're very readable, and someone who knows Haskell can generally see the usefulness of them on the very first page. (Also, CS people should be comfortable slinging code around. Some would argue this point, but having decent programming skills makes anybody whose work involves computers much more effective. Ideological purity be damned.)