Well there's also a difference between what people want to work with at $DAYJOB and what scratches the itch for open source development on the side. If you're a

Well there's also a difference between what people want to work with at $DAYJOB and what scratches the itch for open source development on the side. If you're already working with c++ you know you'll be far more effective to continue doing so for some time, and it's hard to justify telling your employer to spend your time switching to something else. For a hobby or side project, though? You just do what is interesting and fun, and maybe working with new languages is fun to a lot of people. This could account for the (perceived) difficulty in finding c++ contributors, despite the prevalence of c++ in existing code bases.