On: C# is now a better language than Java

[gaius]

I disagree. Anders Hejlsberg was already an experienced language designer with the highly commercially successful Turbo Pascal and Delphi under his belt before he came to Microsoft and developed C#. James Gosling only had worked on Oak before Java, a language which never made it past the stage of an internal research project at Sun. It's disingenuous to say MS "copied" anyone in this case - they simply went out and found an experienced languages guru and hired him. Just like when they needed someone who knew about operating systems, they hired Dave Cutler from DEC.

[st3fan → gaius]

Oak == Java 1.0. The first Java runtime beta that I installed on a Solaris box in 96 or so was called Oak.

[gaius → st3fan]

I've been using Java on and off since around then (first paying gig in '96) and even at 0.9 it was called Java.