I agree with your point but I don't know if theoretical linguistics is really such an absurd degree to show programming aptitude. It's quite an analytical subject and the structures of natural languages do have some parallels with the structures of programming languages, plus of course natural language processing is a big area of computational research.

When I was choosing a degree I often heard that people with Classics degrees found it easy to get recruited as programmers. I have no idea how true that is but my former boss took that route. I dropped out of my CS degree and often wish I'd studied something language-related instead.

(I didn't really know what CS was before I started studying it - what I really wanted was to learn to take my programming to the next level of turning little 100-line programs into real projects, which I know now is almost unrelated to theoretical CS and really just needed a little more reading and a lot more practice. This was in the days before StackExchange and Github, or I might have worked it out in time to save myself from being yet another CS dropout.)