Did Firefly or Battlestar Galactica ever win an Emmy? Nope.
Battlestar Galactica (reimagined) won twice for special visual effects, once for sound editing, and one for a "Razor" featurette.
What really killed C++ for me was when a student created a situation like this:
std::string somefunction(){}
The fact that such a thing can compile is a glaring error. A function that declares a return type should have a return statement in it, and that should be beyond question. In C, failing to actually return will cause you to have corrupt data; in C++, it can cause a crash, when a temporary object that was never created is destroyed (and happens to have a virtual destructor, which is common).
Corrupt data can just as easily crash a C program. Suppose the function should allocate and return a nul-terminated string, but it falls off the end:
char * somefunction()
{
}
// ...
char *s = somefunction()
printf("%s\n", s);
free(s);
You laugh, but I have never observed a self-serve gas station in New Jersey....
That's right. Self-serve is illegal in New Jersey, and also Oregon.
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.