It the teaching and not the language
I teach in a technical school setting where we teach how to program. Theory is there but every course has a programming component supervised by the instructor and the quality of the code is as important as the correctness of the result. Unfortunately the university environment is so focused on theory and research that the details of programming are far too often left up to the individual students. That's why most of the code you have encountered is so poor. Its not the language but rather how it is (or is not) taught. I tell my students that if their code produces the correct result then that is usually worth only 20% of the grade.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
