> Besides the laughably condescending matter of calling Java (which first appeared in 1995), C# (first appeared in 2000), and Ruby (first appeared in 1995) “novel,”

I think "novel" means that they were Greenfield languages. They certainly took concepts from preexisting languages (like Java's "interfaces" being inspired by Objective-C's "protocols"), but they didn't start their lives as "existing-language-with-X," the way C++ was "C, with classes."