This was done as a free summer course. Language bigotry aside, offering a course to learn another language outside those taught in the standard curriciulum, especially one which costs students nothing, is a win for everyone.

If I offered you free cyanide but I told you it's candy, it's that a win too?

Most programming topics are going downwards on Google Trends. Probably because more non-programmers are getting online, while all programmers are already using the internet. The exceptions are very new and hot programming topics.

Interesting that Ruby and Python have been flat for a while.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl,+python,+ruby&ctab=0...

I wouldn't have guessed they'd each surpassed Perl around 2007.

Edit: Also, despite a steady decline, watch Java dwarf them all:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl,+python,+ruby,+java&...

Those numbers are inflated a bit by people searching about snakes, gemstones, coffee and Indonesia. Try adding "programming" to each term: http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl+programming%2C+python+pr...