C++ still?

[Slopey]

Outside of game development and embedded systems, the corporate world has pretty much standardised on C# for application/web development these days - certainly on Windows. I've not encountered many people doing C++ in a RAD environment recently - not when there's such good toolsuite support for C#/.Net available now with DevExpress/Infragistics etc.

 

[Asmodean]

This left me to question where C++ comes into play now-a-days?

Legacy code.
Embedded systems (C/ASM though, not C++)
Device driver development.
OS/Kernel development (might not be optimal to write, say a page handler in Java for instance),

are some areas that springs to mind directly. You probably do not want to program a PIC using C# or Java.

As for learning, higher level languages will of course be good for learning things like abstraction, encapsulation and so on. Basic programming concepts like sequences, selection, iteration, recursion as well. Quick and easy way to learn about algorithms and algorithm development as well I guess.

C/C++ are powerful languages, but as someone pointed out, also opens you up to huge risks. It hands you a loaded gun, but offers no protection if you aim it at your own foot and pulls the trigger. (Just see how many people who think arrays and pointers are equivalent in C for instance, or who depends on undefined behavior, or knows nothing about what a sequence point is, and so on). In that regard alone it makes sense at least to start people off on easier, more protective languages when teaching programming.

 

[Jason S]

C++ is still a major games programming language and should be for a long while yet.

COBOL, c# and java are major languages for business logic.

edit : There are still way more lines of code in operation in COBOL than anything else and the majority of COBOL programmers will be retiring within the next 10 years. I am not saying COBOL is good or not, just that it is still important due to its widespread use.

 

[manifold]

I find c++ to occupy a peculiar sweet spot in languages at the moment. Not to say that I'm particularly happy that it's still the thing occupying it after soooooo many years. But I feel it to be the highest-level low-level language You know? The language that gives you access to the most high-level concepts while still providing you with all of the low-level tools you could ever need. I often wish that it had more in the way of the high-level, but anything else that I would try to move to simply doesn't have enough power :S

I guess that's why we still use it all over the games industry.

My opinion is that, because of the fact that it has that odd quality of being a widely-used and finely-balanced (high-level low-level) language, it is very much worth learning