Point being, the premise of your argument isn't granted. Is C++ going away soon? Or is it holding steady and even growing? How can someone objectively know either way?
But we keep expecting languages like COBOL and MUMPS to die, and they keep living on.
I think there’s a almost 100% chance that 1000 years from now, when all that’s left of human civilization is a bunch of bots trading hustle culture spam and culture war arguments on a zombie internet, that the whole thing will still run on some mission critical code written in C. Buggy, unsafe, but mission critical and hard to replace.
And of course there will be heated bot arguments about how it should all be scrapped and rewritten in Rust++.
You can already give GPT a decent-sized chunk of C code and ask it to rewrite it in, say, Rust, and it works with some rate of success.
For the last 50 years, this was impossible to do in a generic way. In the last 6 months, we managed to move the needle from impossible to possible. Give it another 12000 months, and what are the chances this would not move towards "trivial"?
The problem with changing a mission-critical system is risk, and cost. Maybe omniscient AIs in 3023 won't have this issue, but my ghost will be entirely unsurprised if there are still mission critical systems written in C laying around because whatever benefits are rewrite would give are dwarfed by the risk, perceived or real, of what happens if the rewrite isn't 100% perfect or doesn't 100% match the current system.
No. It's not going away anytime soon, but you can look at high-performance languages that are gaining in popularity, and that may point to change in the future. TIOBE isn't perfect, but it's a good indicator of interest, and Rust and Go seem to continue to gain popularity.
Interestingly, and related to this article, Fortran has moved up from #31 to #20 on TIOBE's index, which really does speak to the importance of a math-optimized, high performance, compiled language. Another interesting change is MATLAB moving up from #20 to #14.
> Most popular technologies This year, we're comparing the popular technologies across three different groups: All respondents, Professional Developers, and those that are learning to code.
Most popular technologies > Programming, scripting, and markup languages
The Top 500 Green500 (and the TechEmpower Web Framework benchmarks) are also great resources for estimating what people did this past year; what are the "BigE" of our models in terms of water, kwh of [directly or PPA-offset] sourced clean energy.