EDIT: I stand corrected: It looks like John Carmack has indeed been using C++ since Doom 3. I sheepishly admit to having based my believe that he still used C on having looked at the Quake 3 source code many many years ago. What next, Carmack decides that he prefers Direct3D?

Point taken about the orthogonality of language choice and programming ability. There are great programmers who use Lisp, there are great programmers (like Mr Carmack) who use C and then there are great programmers like Richard Stallman who can write Emacs in Lisp and then write GCC in C (albeit with a Lispy flavour).