Nicely put! Many of us feel the same way: how we are approaching programming through PL today in much of the academic community is contributing to those gaps, not eliminating them. There is also a chance to evolve the topic of programming to one of human advancement (among other things), the old approaches aren't moving things forward so much anyways. See what Bret Victor did with programming topics in just a few short years, I see a lot of potential there!