I see your point, comparing languages created for robustness and programmer productivity with languages created for raw hardware access and performance doesn't make much of a point.
However, C++ tries to be both, that's what's special about it. It's also arguably the cause of most of its problems and it's complexity, but that is what makes it powerful and useful - for certain applications.
> The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.
Twitter seems to use Scala for most of their backend (after growing too large for Ruby), but Google and Facebook (arguably operating at larger scale than Twitter) mostly use C++ there AFAIK.
However, C++ tries to be both, that's what's special about it. It's also arguably the cause of most of its problems and it's complexity, but that is what makes it powerful and useful - for certain applications.
> The main micro blogging site I use is a mixture of scala, java, with ruby/iOS for the front end.
Twitter seems to use Scala for most of their backend (after growing too large for Ruby), but Google and Facebook (arguably operating at larger scale than Twitter) mostly use C++ there AFAIK.