C++ ? C++ ? It was eclipsed by Java, and Java is ancient history. It’s all apps now. Who programs? What do they program in? I don’t even know!
I mean, what was “Angry Birds” programmed in? Tell me it was C++ ! Ha, could be for all I know.
A lot of scripting languages are used for rapid development (FR uses a lot of Perl). Much of of the web runs on PHP and JavaScript as well as variants of those.
Still those high-level languages have to be written in something and that something is often C++ or even C. The operating systems themselves are written in some combination of C, C++ and assembly for the hardware-specific code.
When you need to be close to the hardware, because you have a heavily computation bound task, it’s hard to beat C and subsets of C++ (full C++ is a pig in the way it allocates/deallocates arrays on the heap) — unless you go to assembler. Angry Birds doesn’t need to produce 3-dimensional graphics, so it would be happy enough in Java.
C and C++ are useful, very powerful languages - Java's "program once, use anywhere" is not completely true and its creation of a virtual engine, never-ending sequence of libraries, and not completely compiled status has advantages and disadvantages
C has its uses and is still heavily used in POS machines.
More to the point, COBOL, MVS, JCL, shell-scripts etc. ARE the languages to learn and know. A lot of the core stuff for most transactions are still COBOl
And I suspect Angry Birds has a C core and guess they use some OOPs language for the rest, but don't know. I think it has some .lua files, but...