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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.

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