"Well, sure, but that doesn't mean it's not in a decline that is very unlikely to reverse course."
Which taken to the logical conclusion will mean its disappearance.
Except there are plenty of industry standards that only acknowledge C and C++, and safer languages that depend on them for their own compilers, including mighty Rust.
COBOL has been in decline for almost the entirety of my time on this earth. And, yet....
There are billions of lines of C++ code in production use. That doesn't disappear overnight, and I've never said it would or even suggested it would disappear overnight. But, the relevance of C++ for the average developer seems likely to never be higher than is it today, and the amount of code written in C++ vs. safer languages, seems likely to decline.
You're arguing with a different assertion than the one I've made.
It may decline, yet until those safer languages get fully bootstraped, someone will keep writing fresh C++ to keep those compilers and language runtimes going.
COBOL latest ISO version is from 2023, by the way.
