My argument applies equally well to that: the mere fact that a religion has large numbers of adherents does not in and of itself show that it is either good or

My argument applies equally well to that: the mere fact that a religion has large numbers of adherents does not in and of itself show that it is either good or useful. But that's a harder case to make because it turns on what is meant by "good" and "useful", and those are things about which reasonable people can disagree. To be clear, "fitness as a general purpose programming language" is also something about which reasonable people can (and manifestly do) disagree. All I'm saying is that having large numbers of adherents is not a valid argument in favor of fitness any more than it is an argument in favor of goodness or usefulness. It's possible that all it shows is that a lot of people drank the kool-aid. [UPDATE] It's also possible that most of the people using C++ think that it sucks, and they are all just using it because everyone else is using it.