> So what is the general concensus on this subject?
Go check out various jobsites and see how many want C++ skills compared to say Intercal (or whatever else you want to compare with) skills.
Consider that Cobol and Fortran are some 30 years older than C++, yet they seem to be as popular as ever in the niches they occupy.
> designing and writing applications from scratch.
That depends entirely on your application - the world does not run on 2GHz P4 machines with 512MB of memory and a windows OS. You're not going to have VB on your mobile phone anytime soon are you.
