"Basically all of the software companies with market cap north of a billion dollars have web-facing apps written in C++ and Java."
Not really true, unless you mean "have web-facing apps written in C++ and Java" in the same sense that they "have web-facing apps written in PHP and Python". I posted a list on Reddit, based on publicly available information (employee blog posts, mailing lists):
You're collapsing stuff down in an interesting way that makes these marginal languages look more important than they probably are. If you were to do it by lines of codes, organizational importance, financial pay off, number of engineers working in a language, or pretty much any metric other than "does ___ use ___ somewhere in their codebase?," I think you'll find that Java and C++ are huge.
That said, sure, folks use other languages, too. Yahoo and Facebook are particularly good examples of companies that have more than the typical share of a non-Java/non-C++ language for their apps. And even they use C++ (and maybe Java) elsewhere.
"If you were to do it by lines of codes, organizational importance, financial pay off, number of engineers working in a language, or pretty much any metric other than "does ___ use ___ somewhere in their codebase?,"
The flip side of that is that perhaps Java and C++ are huge because it takes more engineers and lines of code to accomplish the same task, and hence the potential financial payoff and organizational importance needs to be higher to justify their use. ;-)
Not really true, unless you mean "have web-facing apps written in C++ and Java" in the same sense that they "have web-facing apps written in PHP and Python". I posted a list on Reddit, based on publicly available information (employee blog posts, mailing lists):
http://programming.reddit.com/info/2614t/comments/c264lk
There's some Java and C++, but there's also a lot of Python and PHP.