I had a similar experience, if I'm interpreting this correctly, in that my university was pretty focused on the theory. I had a lot of CS courses where we were

I had a similar experience, if I'm interpreting this correctly, in that my university was pretty focused on the theory. I had a lot of CS courses where we were programming in "pen and paper." When we did write code it was often Java, but you knew that any course you took the professor could swap in pretty much anything else. Depending on the AI professor, you'd work in Java or Scheme. Compilers class could be a C-like language targeting MIPS with the compiler written using C++ or it could be a Java-like language targeting the JVM with the compiler in Java (though I should say these "little languages" were probably very similar because they were a very small subset of their respective languages). I think if you learn the fundamentals (and that often means having a good grasp on C) it shouldn't be too terrifying to pick up at decent grasp on lots of languages.