This is exactly my train of thought. But a lot of these developers don't really mind not getting the press---these jobs do pay really well. As far as I know, for instance, C++ game engine developers or people who write powerful, scalable web servers for in-house use make quite a lot of money nowadays. It's a completely different life than the engineers working in risky, fragile startups in return for a high possible payout, but who has it better here is debatable... and a matter of personal opinion, I guess.

Still, writing about Dropbox or Facebook or Stripe or whatever is now hot is way more interesting for the journalists. However, there's no doubt that the guy who wrote nginx or the Unity team (the game engine, not the Ubuntu GUI) made a hell of an impact on the industry, too. It's just that it takes more technical expertise to actually appreciate what these guys have done. That's the reason why most of the people know Steve Wozniak (if at all) as "that guy who worked for Jobs." Not that Facebook or Dropbox or Stripe or Jobs don't deserve the praise, it's just that they've built their empires on technology that also does.

>It is the blind spot of the Web/Silicon Valley/Startup world that not all programming is web programming. ... there is a stupendous number of developers working on good old-fashioned desktop applications and embedded software.

I've always thought that myself. It would be interesting if there were some statistics on that.

There are lots of things that keep C++ relevant, not only Qt.

Such as?

Big PC games are almost always written in C++.

The Phusion Passenger application server is in C++.

Node.js is in C++.

If you count C in the same breath, then between them, they make up the implementation language for probably 99% of other languages, and the operating systems those languages run on.

For anything safety critical, C in particular still has a vice-like stranglehold in many industries (e.g. automobile)

> For anything safety critical, C in particular still has a vice-like stranglehold in many industries (e.g. automobile)

Which is kind of ironic, given its well known foot-shooting abilities.

That's partly why the use it: the problems with C are well understood by many people. They choose the devil they know.

The wonderful language itself, with broad scope for expressing ideas in a terse if not cryptic way. It's great.

Not thought about that, but I suppose desktop apps are where C++ is truly relevant. I am not sure that it is entirely Qt keeping it relevant though!

I see the desktop applications being swallowed up by C# at the moment.