So funny anecdote, I once asked a candidate which programming languages he knew and he replied "All of them, BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL." :-)
More seriously though the point in the article is solid, all computers have broadly similar architectures and the number of concepts needed to express computation on those architectures is finite, so starting with a language in each "category" of expression and and then adding additional languages in each category can quickly teach you the essence of computing. At that point a new language can be quickly picked up and mastered once you've mapped the essential concepts to the idioms of the new language.
More seriously though the point in the article is solid, all computers have broadly similar architectures and the number of concepts needed to express computation on those architectures is finite, so starting with a language in each "category" of expression and and then adding additional languages in each category can quickly teach you the essence of computing. At that point a new language can be quickly picked up and mastered once you've mapped the essential concepts to the idioms of the new language.
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