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Comment by osweiller | Hacker News Reader

While C (and its love-child C++) bizarrely appears high in most synthetic programming popularity rankings, I personally doubt more than 5% of developers (if that) ply their days in it, or have more than a passing competency in it.

Everyone is programming in Java, C#, JavaScript, and so on. Aside from myself, I haven't a single professional peer who develops on C (anecdotal, of course, but this is a pretty big net crossing multiple cities and industries) in any real way.

It just happens to be that much of the most important software is written in it. Maybe there's something in that.

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I wouldn't minimize the amount of C(++), or the amount of mis-counting for jobs where C(++) is a desired skill, but not primary in the job role. There are a lot of jobs out there working on embedded systems where C/C+ are king. Though I do hope that Rust gains more traction in that space to avoid certain classes of bugs.

I would guess that most development involves JS, as I would say that most development is directed in web applications of some kind. Though there are backend languages as well. For the types of development jobs I'm used to looking for, I see a lot more C# and Java, with some uptick in Node and Python. Excluding PHP (because shiver).

I have several friends who work in the embedded space, and that is not small by any means.

I developed most of my hobby projects in C until recently. It's not as rare as you think. C is a good language to think in.

Lately I've been switching to Ada, which I actually quite recommend if you like C. Shame it never really caught on, but using C libraries from Ada is trivial so there's not much of a library issue in spite of lack of popularity.

~5% of developers, while small compared to the whole, still encompasses about a million of the estimated 20 million developers worldwide.

The other poster rightly mentioned the embedded space, and that is absolutely true (and indeed it is where I gained my affinity for C and C++), however there are easily 20 middleware / web / mobile developers for every embedded developer.

This is just selection bias - you probably just don't run into 'C' programmers.

It's nothing but a path-dependent accident of history.

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