Yet the largest codebases I know of are either C, Fortran, or C++. Who's doing anything really big (in terms of LOC) in another language?
C/C++ basically demand that codebases be large. And we hear all the time about software troubles written in these languages. Finding reports of this are almost endless.
I think people who write complex applications in more sane languages end up not having to write millions of lines of code that no one actually understands. The sane languages are more concise and don't require massive hurdles to try and bake in saftey into the codebase. Safety is baked into the language itself.
That's quite debatable. C++ is well known to scale poorly.