I definitely think the rigor and theoretical basis should still be maintained; definitely NOT saying CS programs should make themselves more vocational though I

I definitely think the rigor and theoretical basis should still be maintained; definitely NOT saying CS programs should make themselves more vocational though I do see plenty of room for more practical interdisciplinary degrees to spring up. Not sure about the assertion that Data Structures can only be taught properly in a low level language. Any rigorous course would be pretty much orthogonal to the language's peculiarities. You could implement RED-Black trees in Javascript as easy as any language. The cool thing, for any language you pick, as a side effect you'll get to dive deeper in that language's particular features and idioms while also learning the Data Structures theory. So why not Javascript or Python or Haskell or...? I could imagine some cool projects coming out of this one, like implementing your own efficient Shadow DOMs using the various tree structures that get covered.