There was a time not too long ago that nobody ever said &quot;C++ remains&quot;, what they said was &quot;Nothing can challenge C++&quot;. It was <i>the</i> &quot;business programming&quot; language. The fact that it&#x27;s now &quot;surviving&quot; and &quot;remaining&quot; is a testament to how far it&#x27;s fallen, not how successful it&#x27;s become. It didn&#x27;t rise from 0 to &quot;used&quot; over the last 5 years, that&#x27;s something a new language Go can claim with pride; no - it went from &quot;used everywhere by everyone&quot; to &quot;still used, somewhat&quot;. C is <i>still</i> more popular, at least according to TIOBE.<p>Java stole it&#x27;s crown for &quot;enterprise&quot; programming and Microsoft even pretty much abandoned it in favor of .NET. I&#x27;m not sure their massive push for &quot;C++ is back!&quot; that happened &#x27;round C++11 has really met with that much success - the world moved on, honestly.<p>There&#x27;s fewer and fewer niches for it - the web could care less for it, heavy-duty &quot;enterprise&quot; programmers aren&#x27;t giving up their safe and GC-based Java&#x2F;.NET languages and giant 3rd-party eco-systems, and even video games now can be written in a higher-level language where only a small core 99% of people never interact with is in C&#x2F;C++.<p>The problem is, IMO, that it&#x27;s too late for C++ to be a decent language. If the first iteration of it was C++11, then sure. But there are vast code bases out there written in the horrible mid-90&#x27;s or late 80&#x27;s dialect of C++ that aren&#x27;t going anywhere. Even something like Qt isn&#x27;t true &quot;modern&quot; C++, and don&#x27;t get me started on MFC. Look at Google&#x27;s official C++ guidelines - they <i>barely</i> allow any modern C++ into their code-base.