[pjmlp]

> > One of the exciting things in Visual Studio .NET is its language agnosticism. If a vendor has written a .NET-compliant language, you can use it in Visual Studio .NET. It'll work just as well as C# or C++ or Visual Basic. This isn't just a future feature-in-planning. There are already nearly two dozen languages being developed for Visual Studio .NET: Visual Basic, C#, C++, JScript, APL, Cobol, Eiffel, Fortran, Pascal, Perl, Python, RPG, Smalltalk, Oberon, Component Pascal, Haskell/Mondrian, Scheme, Mercury, Alice, and even the Java language.

-- February 2002 issue of MSDN Magazine

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2002...

[CharlieDigital]

Not sure what the point is here, but that reality for .NET never really came to fruition. Now only C# and a tiny sliver of F# really dominate most of development on .NET.

[javcasas]

Well, Microsoft has always been about "our stuff is first class citizen, everything else is second class citizen". You could see that in the 2000s when Microsoft claimed Windows 2003 to be multiplatform because it could run binaries from windows 95, windows 98, windows 2000 and windows xp.

What happened with .net is that C# is first class, F# is second class, and everything else is third class citizen at best (when not directly attacked via patent litigation).

[MaxBarraclough]

I'm late to the party, but has Microsoft sued anyone over doing things with .Net?

[pjmlp]

They might dominate, yet the CLR is polyglot and you can even buy Eiffel, Cobol and Fortran compilers to it, today.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...

https://www.silverfrost.com/1/default.aspx

https://www.eiffel.com/eiffelstudio/screenshots/

People do pay money to target it, go figure!

[ridruejo]

Regardless of its technical merits, .NET was never adopted universally, WebAssembly is on the path to do so. It is also not exclusive: Blazor is a successful Microsoft product implementing WebAssembly leveraging .NET