AFAIK it is pretty common for most universities in Germany to start CS programs with either (S)ML, OCaml, Haskell or any combination of these depending upon the individual preferences of the responsible chair.
Java is (was?) pretty common for introductory OO classes. Advanced OO classes (outside of a "Software Engineering" context) though often introduce Eiffel, Smalltalk, Python, C++ and C# as well.
Depending upon your particular choice of courses, specialization etc., being exposed to Lisp, Prolog, Perl, C and R isn't uncommon either and from what I heard Scala is also starting to appear as a teaching language.
From what I heard the curriculum in France, Swiss, Austria and Denmark is very similar. So I am a bit surprised of the notion that there are universities out there where you can get a CS degree without being exposed to some functional programming.
I am also quite familiar with the Java (and Ruby and pre iPhone Objective-C) ecosystem and invested quite a lot time in getting proficient with Scala since 2007 but recently got hooked on F#.
My experience has been, that the available documentation on .Net (and F#) is so much better compared to the other stacks I know, that after three months or so of dabbling in my free time with .Net I already feel like having a much more solid base in .Net than the other platforms (where I have 4, 3 and 6 years experience).
Granted this might be due to me either suck at Java, Ruby and Objective-C or me not yet having real world experience with .Net and being oblivious to ugly corner cases, warts etc. you only come across on a big real world project.
But honestly my first contact with some of the books and online resources available for the .Net ecosystem and comparing that with what I was accustomed to was shocking.
I can't talk for Python, but from my limited experience the Ruby community started to get the submerged in a wave of sub-par developers when Obie Fernandez et al. started to promote the meme, that attending a Ruby/Rails related conference puts you in the top 5% bracket of software developers.
The last time I tried installing Batteries (on OS X) it was a big PITA and it looked like it was dead in the water (this was about 18 months ago).
During the same time using GODI to install a xml processing library completely hosed my system after me foolishly granting it root rights, which killed my OCaml enthusiasm for good.
OCaml is in itself a really nice language (apart from some warts like lack of native multithreading support) but it's tooling, infrastructure and "first developer experience" and lack of progress in these areas in the last years is beyond atrocious (compared to F#, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Ruby, Python, JavaScript).
The "Walz" is not for building primary skills (i.e. in our case Software Development or in their case Carpentry). It is assumed that carpenters doing it are already quite skilled in their respective profession. The reason of the "Walz" is to teach self reliance, soft skills and to round out ones primary skills by being exposed to practices of their craft that have evolved/developed differently from those they learned during their apprenticeship.
In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer (so in our case to become a founder).
I think the internet undermines these goals, because, well IMHO it is becoming more and more a gigantic echo chamber (we all read the same blogs/books, admire the same persons, use remarkably similar tools etc.)
I think it is astounding that a lot of very smart people assume that currently hip and promoted best development practices, say for a Web 2.0 whatever platform are relevant for other areas (e.g embedded, big iron, medical, aeronautic, finance) because there is not much evident push back in the blog sphere from practitioners in these spheres... which AFAIK is more a result of these people tending to much less likely to blog or work on open source software, than of the universal applicability of said practices (and if the push back, the results I have seen so far have been highly embarrassing for the hipster crowd).
In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer
Not just originally, for some professions you're still not allowed to have your own business without your "Meister" degree. Never understood why this included hairdressers…
Totally agree with your assessment of the web subsection of the IT profession. And it's quite splintered, with the "young turks" against academia against the enterprise, with plenty of small areas of expertise vanishing in the cracks. It does get a bit better if the forum of discussion is sufficiently abstract and spread over different niches (e.g. programming languages that transcend specific fandoms).
