> Do they not know that basically every important piece of software today is still written in those languages?
A blatant overstatement. There's lots of important work done for the CLR (MS, many others), Java (Sun, Google, Amazon, bits of Facebook, IBM, etc, etc) or in Python (Dropbox) or in Cobol (banks...sigh). Yeah, there's plenty of important C/Cpp code but it's probably in a minority of "important", even if important just means "commercial" or "popular".
A blatant overstatement. There's lots of important work done for the CLR (MS, many others), Java (Sun, Google, Amazon, bits of Facebook, IBM, etc, etc) or in Python (Dropbox) or in Cobol (banks...sigh). Yeah, there's plenty of important C/Cpp code but it's probably in a minority of "important", even if important just means "commercial" or "popular".