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by damagednoob 951 days ago
I can't think of anyone besides Anders Hejlsberg that has a better track record with programming language innovation. At least 3 different languages that have all been commercially successful.
2 comments

It's tricky to compare. Anders is involved in a bunch of important stuff, but it's not as though it's all successes either. He's certainly important, but I don't know how to compare "track records" on "innovation" because that's so vague.

One of his projects at Microsoft was J++ which is basically own-brand Java. Doubtless that's great material for learning to design C# but nobody is going to claim J++ was a success.

Only because Sun's lawsuit, several C# features were already present in J++ as the extensions that caused the lawsuit in first place.

VM integration with host OS, J/Direct (P/Invoke), events, COM integration, WFC (Windows Forms).

Dennis Richie[0] and/or Ken Thompson[1] might be of interest.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson