[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“Some companies are so large they don’t care. When Microsoft
innovated Digital Nervous System they must have been aware that the
TLA would be confusing and ambiguous. When Microsoft created a
little OS for a PDA, did nobody in the company point out that Win
CE would be pronounced wince?”
“Some companies are so large they don’t think. Microsoft’s
latest little joke on the Internet is a new language, C#. Now, what
exactly were they thinking here when some bright spark came up with
that name? To a musician, the pronunciation, ‘C sharp’, is
reasonable and obvious. But the # character is heavily overloaded
with names. The recent SlashDot discussion on C# came up with
the following list of perfectly reasonable alternatives…
- c hash
- c pound
- c cardinal
- c octothorp”
“Now, Microsoft being a really innovative company, will already
have modified the search engine on www.microsoft.com to cope with
C#… Well, no. When tested on July 19th, Microsoft’s site search
facility couldn’t find pages containing C# (nor any reasonable
alternative, quoted or unquoted.) A quick check with Google didn’t
find any relevant pages either, but it may just be too soon after
the announcement and Google’s spider may not have scanned any C#
web pages yet, or it may just treat # as another inter-word
character to be ignored.”