Idk why they picked C++. Probably because it makes more sense for large projects. I was not arguing that there were no C++ FOSS projects, I was merely stating that overall, in the FOSS community, the vast majority of developers dislike C++. I am surprised that people seem to disagree with that.
I'll grant that it might be related to the company I tend to keep, as established above, but I've seriously never had the impression that there is anywhere near a majority of FOSS developers that actively dislike C++, especially seen vs. C.
I'd say the majority of FOSS developers most likely don't care, because they use higher-level languages doing web-related work for which either language isn't well-suited due to the tooling and deployment realities. So I guess it depends on whether you equate disinterest with dislike and you might be right. But among the developers that reasonably could use C++ I don't think there's a majority explicitly avoiding its use.
I have been using Linux distributions since the kernel 1.0.9 days, on those days there were not much higher level languages being used and just mentioning C++ would be the start of an endless flamewar.
There were developers avoiding KDE and everything else that they knew was coded in C++.
For a while I did participate in gtkmm (C++ bindings for GNOME) and it was hard to get ourselves heard by the GNOME guys. Funny enough after a few years they came up with Vala and now are even proposing JavaScript!
If it wasn't for FOSS projects, the use of C would probably be much less than it is today.
The main reason I think was that C++ support in open source compilers used to be rubbish, and the libstdc++ used to break binary compatibility all the time (from what I've heard).
That was many years ago, but people still think C++ is rubbish because of this, and it failed to gain traction in the open source community because of it. Which is a shame, because it's quite a nice language once you learn the details and are able to use it properly.
I think it was language religion above anything else, but my memory is a bit fuzzy from those discussions.
Personally I have a sweet spot for the Pascal family of languages and their strong typing, so I only started using C and later C++ when forced to do so.
My first contact with C was at high school (Turbo C 2.0 - 1992), after knowing already a few Assembly versions and Turbo Pascal. Shortly thereafter I got to have my hands on Turbo C++ 1.0, and since then only used C instead of C++ at the university classes that required it, or on a few projects at work. My last application done in C was around 2002.
Nowadays I use a lot of languages depending on the project, but in what concerns C and C++, I will always pick C++ unless requested otherwise.
