But we are trained to deduce unreasonable expectations from terse book titles and then blame that on the publishers.
I'm glad Peter posted the Norvig article and guess the 'ars longa, vita brevis' theme is there in Tate's book title in a cheeky way.
Of the languages I've encountered, maybe over 20 if allowing things like bash and assembly, most I haven't used in years. They were formative. Or they were trendy. The most "practical" language for me has that word in its acronym expansion. I once learned a functional language called ML, just to teach it, because someone had decided it should be on a syllabus. I suspect we may agree well on the value of such academic trajectories Mathieu, however I was interested to see in the Woodman book you mentioned; "From ML to C via Modula-3: an approach to teaching programming" which seems like a torturous path to put students through. Anyway, Tate wants to urge this empirical pluralism, that learning languages is good for you whether you use them or not, for purely self-developmental reasons.