Skip to main content

The Story Behind the Name C#

I remember one time in an exam for employment , the first question was - who is the father of C#? I have been working with the language but never did I ask myself who actually started the language ( of course Mirosoft was the brainchild , right? ) . After a googling expedition I found out who was the culprit - Microsofts Anders Hejlsberg. I was not interested why it was called C# then , but opening my VS2008 today , I stumbled on one of the articles being shown at the VS2008 opening page - "Computer World: The A-Z of Programming : C#". Its an interview with Anders discussing the history and beyond of C# . Heres the cool part , the name for C# prior to its release was actually COOL (C like Object Oriented Language) . Below are some lines taken from the interview:

Why was the language originally named Cool, and what promoted the change to C#?

The code name was Cool, which stood for ‘C like Object Oriented Language’. We kind of liked that name: all of our files were called .cool and that was kind of cool! We looked seriously at keeping the name for the final product but it was just not feasible from a trademark perspective, as there were way too many cool things out there.

So the naming committee had to get to work and we sort of liked the notion of having an inherent reference to C in there, and a little word play on C++, as you can sort of view the sharp sign as four pluses, so it’s C++++. And the musical aspect was interesting too. So C# it was, and I’ve actually been really happy with that name. It’s served us well.



Read more about this article on ComputerWorld.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Getting Started with Stateless : A Lightweight Workflow Library Alternative for .NET

Image Credit: https://www.pioneerrx.com A year ago, I was looking for a simple workflow manager for a project I was working. Its a medium sized application that involves tracking the state of assets in the system. Back in 2008, Microsoft (MS) introduced new technologies along with the release of Visual Studio 2008: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and  Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Having worked in a company utilizing mostly MS products for development, my first option was to go with WF. After doing some time reading and studying the library, I paused and decided it was too complex for my requirement. Using WF would be an overkill and the fact that it has, a rather, steep learning curve, there has to be another option. My mind toyed with the idea of developing a simple workflow library myself. It would be a learning experience but it might end up consuming a lot of time. Why reinvent the wheel? So I started querying the ...

Hiding Unwanted Python Folders and Files in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a universal editor and pretty good at it. However, the explorer view maybe cluttered with the automatically generated folders and files confusing developers. Python is no different. Below are example files and folders generated by Python. The __pycache__ folder and *.pyc files  are totally unnecessary to the developer. To hide these files from the explorer view, we need to edit the settings.json for VSCode. Add the folder and the files as shown below: Copy and paste the lines below : "**/*.pyc" : { "when" : "$(basename).py" }, "**/__pycache__" : true

Cyber-bullying : The "good", the bad and the ugly

Image courtesy of http://www.digitalesq.com/ Cyber-bullying is defined as  the willful and repeated use of cell phones, computers, and other electronic communication devices to harass and threaten others. With the advent of social media, the incidents has increased in numbers and the victims does not even know what is hitting them. For the past years, we have heard of  depressions and deaths because of this. Yet, there has never been a strong drive to increase public awareness and promote support groups to help victims outside of the schools.  Campaigns and programs has never gained mainstream presence enough to make an impact.