> Do they not know that basically every important piece of software today is still written in those languages?
A blatant overstatement. There's lots of important work done for the CLR (MS, many others), Java (Sun, Google, Amazon, bits of Facebook, IBM, etc, etc) or in Python (Dropbox) or in Cobol (banks...sigh). Yeah, there's plenty of important C/Cpp code but it's probably in a minority of "important", even if important just means "commercial" or "popular".
I disagree. Most operating systems, desktop applications, web browsers, and fundamental Internet services (web servers, BIND, MTAs, etc) are written in C/C++. Dropbox is not in that league of important.
So you're arguing with me over what "important" means. If "important" means nearer the bottom of the stack, then yeah, you win. I doubt many people see it that way though.
If by "bottom of the stack" you mean "the code that the top of the stack depends on in order to run at all," then I would say that he is correct in what "important" means.
It seems to me that people seem to magic away these things... The only type of context they can place programming/using languages is within in a web application and anything under that is irrelevant.
No, but presuming that the best language was used to implement these runtimes, these languages would be worse off it it weren't for C/C++. And the runtimes qualify as important software in their own right, simply because they inherit from the importance of all the software that runs on them written in other languages.
> these languages would be worse off it it weren't for C/C++.
Definitely.
> And the runtimes qualify as important software in their own right, simply because they inherit from the importance of all the software that runs on them written in other languages.
Also agreed.
The only thing I'm trying to disprove is the thesis that "basically" no important software is written in languages other than C/Cpp.
To add to what codex said, it's impossible to get really proficient at either Python, Ruby, or any other interpreted language without having some sort of understanding of the underlying platform.
A blatant overstatement. There's lots of important work done for the CLR (MS, many others), Java (Sun, Google, Amazon, bits of Facebook, IBM, etc, etc) or in Python (Dropbox) or in Cobol (banks...sigh). Yeah, there's plenty of important C/Cpp code but it's probably in a minority of "important", even if important just means "commercial" or "popular".