I know it's easy (and fun) to hate on Microsoft, but damn do they employ some great engineers/researchers: Erik Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg, Simon Peyton Jones, etc..
Hejlsberg did amazing work on Turbo Pascal/Delphi, which were basically his personal inventions. He then crossed over, and got himself lost in the C#/.net universe - technology some of us wouldn't touch with the proverbial ten foot pole, or one of any length, for that matter.
Considering that his (and my) compatriots Stroustrup and Lerdorf did C++ and PHP repsectively, a national apology might sort of be in order.
Yeah, when Leslie Lamport was mentioned a few days ago I thought to myself that MS has many, many more employees that I know from reading/watching in videos compared to apple, google, ibm etc.
It's Microsoft Research, specifically, that pulls in most of this great talent. Let's not forget the VMS's people run by Cutler that made the kernel, the Xbox hypervisor, and some other stuff. Add Butler Lampson if we're talking CompSci people. The teams behind Dafny, VerveOS, Ironclad, VCC, etc are way ahead of most language-based safety or formal verification in terms of cost/benefit analysis:
Of the three parent listed, I think two (Meijer and Hejlsberg) were both DevDiv. Cutler was OS before moving to Xbox of all things, and I think he's at Azure now? It's certainly not only MSR hiring these guys.
I should've broken up the comment a bit as it looks like I meant all MS Research as you said. I meant to say something along the lines of (1) MS Research is doing a lot of great stuff with some examples and (2) Butler Lampson should've been on the parent's list of top talent at Microsoft. Appreciate you telling me about the mistake, though. :)
