[mvuksano]

> If you need to read tons of fat books to be aware of all the nuances of the language, then the language has failed its goal of being a useful tool to build things.

You should probably judge usefulness the language by how much software was produced using it.

> No wonder that C++ is increasingly becoming a relic confined to the cemetery of bad technological ideas, no new software is being built in it at all, and Rysy and Go are eating all of its cake.

Do you have any data to support this? Where i work (one of FAANG) we don't use Go at all and rust is limited to only certain types of applications. Other stuff is either python or c++.

[blacklight]

> You should probably judge usefulness the language by how much software was produced using it.

Then Fortran and Cobol are probably the most useful languages (and maybe Java can be on that list too), but can we say that they're actually loved by those who program in them, or that they offer a modern and fast way of building software? Eventually, how much software was written in a language is mostly a function of how long that language has been around.

> Do you have any data to support this?

Just pick any news article about any large projects migrating from C/C++ to Go/Rust. C/C++ have historical issues with memory management that make it too easy for the code to blow up. The vast majority of CVEs is about vulnerabilities caused by improper memory allocation, deallocation or assignment. And, in order to mitigate some of those issues, C++ has become so complex that it makes it harder to shoot your foot, but easier to blow up your own leg. Sure, all FAANGs have been writing most of their core software in these languages, but they've also invested a lot of resources in building alternative languages that were simpler but equally performant/expressive.

Keep in mind that FAANG companies have to onboard hundreds or thousands of engineers, and the cost of getting somebody to be proficient in Go, Rust, Python or Kotlin is much, much lower than getting somebody to be proficient in C++ - and, most of all, to get somebody in a position where they can reliably push code to production that doesn't blow up.

[mvuksano]

> Just pick any news article about any large projects migrating from C/C++ to Go/Rust.

Judging usefulness of a language based on news article doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

> Sure, all FAANGs have been writing most of their core software in these languages, but they've also invested a lot of resources in building alternative languages that were simpler but equally performant/expressive.

Sure they invested in new languages but don't forget they also invest much more in existing ones.

[gpderetta]

> Then Fortran and Cobol are probably the most useful languages

There are a lot of critical bits of software written in Fortran. I don't think there is that much Cobol still running around though.

> and maybe Java can be on that list too

Of course java is an useful language!

[TheRealKing]

Fortran is a simple lovely fast parallel language. That is my opinion after 20-years of professional development in more than half a dozen languages.