How many programming languages/programming environments?

[skeatz]

In Embedded Programming week, Neil encourages students to explore as many programming languages and programming environments as possible. I teach & have taught programming in Assembly, C, C++, Basic, Pascal, Java & Python, across many different architectures, so this requirement is no big deal for me. However, for students who are new to programming, or have not touched programming since they left school many years ago, even learning one programming language on one environment is an achievement for one week.

My question is - is it sufficient for a student to demonstrate that he is able to program his Hello Board using one programming language, on one environment (e.g. Arduino IDE), on one hardware architecture, or do we require our students to document competency in many programming languages, across many different environments (Arduino IDE, avr-gcc, avrdude, avr-studio on Windows/Mac/Linux) and different architectures? If so, then how many programming languages, environments and hardware architectures?

This question arises because one of the global evaluators has fed back to one of my students that he has to be able to program his Hello Board in as many programming languages and programming environments as possible.