>>4
So what's the alternative? Lisp/Scheme? No practical way to deliver an application to the consumer. Smalltalk? Ditto. Python/Ruby? Interpreter overhead. D? Absolutely no industry acceptance, standard controlled by one company. Haskell? Poor libraries. Any of the .NET failure? Windows only. Java? Ha!
C and C++ win in OS and desktop programming. Everything else is for internal use, science, or the web.