"However, if you want your Computer Science majors to be able to create the next runtime like the JVMs, .NETs etc. or be able to do some device programming they

"However, if you want your Computer Science majors to be able to create the next runtime like the JVMs, .NETs etc. or be able to do some device programming they need to learn C/C++." 98% of all developers don't actually need to write the next JVM, or .NET or something. "think that Computer Science is cobbling github sourced code with their choice of scripting language." This is the beauty of programming, and I'm sorry you can't appreciate that. Not everyone is willing to stab themselves in the eyeball trying to re-implement the .NET/JVM wheel or other low-level library. It's the same reason the majority of us don't write assembler anymore. We've moved on and abstracted away from that arcane knowledge. Does that mean that arcane knowledge is irrelevant? For most of us, yes. For others, no. "Yes, the startup market is hot and sometimes that's all you need but CS is much more than that. CS is about understanding the underlying models and concepts rather than a language." Meanwhile, in the real world, CS is not really necessary for most business problems. No matter how much you wish to romanticize it as a discipline.