I disagree. C++ is still popular. Like I said earlier, every langauge has its purpose. Heard of any great games written in Java? Because JVM was not designed to do that. Game developers cannot afford to wait for the JVM to kick in the garbage collector. C++  is widely used in the financial sector ( Surprisingly, COBOL too ). Java is quite popular as a backend language. Also, I wholeheartedly disagree to your statement that .NET is stagnating. Microsoft has always capitalized  on the fact that open source gets messy as time passes as there is hardly any authoratitive source ( Linux kernel project  and a few other are exceptions ) . Java's popularity has gone down because of a plethora of inconsistent libraries. Microsoft, on the other hand, has streamlined a lot of their technologies and provides an entire ecosystem with wonderful support , amazing developer tools and documentation. Back in the days, LAMP was the way to go. .NET wasn't mature. Things have changed now. Also, Silverlight was designed to compete with Flash and not with Java but it never picked up . I dont know why Netflix uses it . Since flash is dead, Silverlight will die too. Blame Apple for that . Also, Java is not a platform :). It is a language. A rather bloated one.