Is C++ usage on the decline? I've used a lot of different languages, but I've never had the occasion to learn C++. I work in web search and we tend to use interpreted languages. The argument is that Java or C# is much easier to write/maintain and that we can make up for performance shortcomings by scaling out.

For C++, that's actually not too bad. Now try creating 100,000 threads with synchronized communication. In Go it's trivial:

		$ cat goroutines.go 
		package main

		import (
			"flag"
			"fmt"
		)

		var n *int = flag.Int("n", 100000, "thread count")

		func thread(x int, result chan int) {
			result <- x
		}

		func main() {
			flag.Parse()

			results := make(chan int)
			for i := 0; i < *n; i++ {
				go thread(i, results)
			}
			for i := 0; i < *n; i++ {
				fmt.Println(<-results)
			}
		}
		$ time ./goroutines | tail
		99990
		99991
		99992
		99993
		99994
		99995
		99996
		99997
		99998
		99999

		real	0m0.723s
		user	0m0.396s
		sys	0m0.840s