I guess I hadn't thought about the relative value of multi-language knowledge vs algorithm fundamentals; I sort of assume that any competent programmer has already mastered data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, etc. and given that background, knowledge of multiple languages can improve your skills.

But I take your point; for a programmer who has not mastered the fundamentals, their time is best spent doing just that before embarking on language exploration.

As to your other point about elegance being language dependent, I mostly agree. Pushing a language to do something it was manifestly not designed to do (e.g. monads in C) is often ugly -- Greenspun's 10th rule kicks in. But sometimes such a push is unavoidable. For example, I've had to write bignum code in C (fortunately there's a library for that) and adjustable arrays and manual recursion in old versions of Fortran that supported neither natively. It's not pretty, but it's sometimes necessary because language choice is outside your control.

I'd be very interested in reading your talk if you're able to post it.