“C# [‘C sharp’] is the work of Anders Hejlsberg, the former Turbo
Pascal and Delphi luminary who was the most prominent Borland
staffer lured to Redmond in a stream of defections between 1996 and
1997. Later Borland alleged that a “Dead Borland Society” of
ex-Borland employees at Redmond was poaching key staff from their
old employer, with Anders signing up for a reputed $3 million.
Borland eventually settled out of court on favourable terms…”
“…syntactically it’s very Java like, and from a distance, the
two are practically indistinguishable. Look closer and you get the
definite impression that its authors know Java pretty well, but
were annoyed by some of its idiosyncrasies. … But what’s left out
of this spec is far more interesting. It’s a pretty bare boned
language description, and doesn’t describe a security model, or
come with a library of ready-to-roll classes.”
“…as the redoubtable maintainer of the Java site Cafe Au Lait,
Rusty Harold Elliot points out… “If Microsoft wanted to
really challenge Java, they should have gone with Python. I
just don’t believe it’s possible for any major advances in language
design to be made while restricting oneself to the mistakes
Kernighan and Ritchie made 30 years ago.”