The only joke here is somehow this author thinks the success of your project is dependent on the language you pick
- is the language suitable for the domain?
- is library/community support mature?
- are there enough developers?
- who in the company will support it? It's obvious from HN topics that we are obsessed in language topics.
- it also reflect some part of design philosophy, and it could be good or bad for your project depend on the case.
I've personally never grown comfortable enough with C++ to get to a point where, were I to be the one calling the shots, it would ever be my first choice. But I also recognize that it's dominant in certain spaces for a reason.
At the same time, I have a lot of sympathy for people who prefer C over C++. There's a lot of cognitive overhead involved in understanding the semantics of an object-oriented language, especially a big complex one like C++ or Java. And complex languages do have a tendency to beget complex implementations, even when you're working on a project that could be small and simple.
That reason usually is: "no other compiler were available" or "no other choices at the times".
Sure, there are an uncountable number of other factors, but picking the wrong platform/language can be fatal.
I think, more often than not, language choice is like golf club choice. Different pros have their preferences, but a pro can play a good game with any set of clubs. A novice will blame the clubs for a poor game.
It might matter if you used COBOL, though. Or even C++.
Using C (maybe C++ ?) may be great for micro controllers, a BIOS, a stage 1 bloat loader, OS kernel and device drivers.
If you're writing application software, and probably even server software, you should be using something higher level and a bit more abstracted away from the hardware. Not necessarily by much. But definitely more than C / C++.
If you're a "body shop", then choosing an unpopular language could be fatal, whereas if you're building a specific software product that needs to do certain things on certain platforms, then choosing the language becomes less of a popularity contest and more about how it can help you finish the product quickly with the highest level of quality and performance.
Would you believe I once saw backend service written in PHP4? And not a small one either. It was just the only language the 2 original authors knew... Apparently they had a bit of memory problems because substr (or similar) leaked a few bytes, which over a course of few months amounted to quite a lot of memory.