[zerkten]

People don't appreciate how much of an impact C++ had on C#. People consider it a Java clone, but the first version had many features to support a large segment of C++ (COM) developers that Microsoft wanted to move to .NET. This brought a visible performance hubbub at the time which was often instigated by the folks more comfortable with C++, manual memory management, etc.

[pjmlp]

You are missing the part where Java's clone done by Microsoft, J++ already had those features, and it was the first project Anders worked at Microsoft, hence it also has the property/event ideas from Delphi, and a framework that was the predecessor of Windows Forms.

These were the major pain points for the Java lawsuit that Sun did against Microsoft.

The irony with all these attempts to make COM easier to use is that they always fail flat when the Windows dev team has their turn, and then they undo everything and we are back into C++ and IDL land (latest version of it, C++/WinRT).