That's not what I was questioning - see my other answer for why WinRT was not "reassuring". Now it makes sense, and I can safely not care about WinRT.

As far as Longhorn failing, certainly that was both a disaster in management and not just technology. After all, MS Corp felt generics were and impractical academic and theoretical idea that couldn't be properly implemented in a language like C# or the CLR.

If that's not what you're questioning then IMO don't phrase it as a .NET problem; it is broader than that. There is a pocket of the .NET community that talks as if they shafted .NET in favor of native code, but WinRT is probably more disruptive to the existing Win32/C workflow than it is for people writing C#.

> After all, MS Corp felt generics were and impractical academic and theoretical idea that couldn't be properly implemented in a language like C# or the CLR.

What?!

Generics were only added to .NET 2.0, because it wasn't going to be done on time for the .NET 1.0/1.1 releases.

There are papers from the .NET Beta days already describing the way generics could be implemented, but additional work was still needed at the time.

Generics were only added to .NET 2.0 because MSR got it implemented. Redmond would never have done it alone, and called it academic, theoretic feature. They may have ended up with a lameass implementation of generics, ala Java.

Here's a history by Don Syme, who was one of the main people on this project:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dsyme/archive/2011/03/15/net-c-gener...

Quotes:

  "But I do want to say one thing straight: Generics for .NET and C# in their current form almost didn't happen: it was a very close call, and the feature almost didn't make the cut for Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005)"
  
  "being told by product team members that "generics is for academics only""
  
  "It was only through the total dedication of Microsoft Research, Cambridge during 1998-2004, to doing a complete, high quality implementation in both the CLR [...] and the C# compiler, that the project proceeded."

Microsoft's C# track record shows MC Corp's commitment to higher-level programming pretty well, IMO. LINQ got added just to hit the "LINQ" target (and Erik Meijer mighta been a big force there). But even then: the C# 3.0 were only implemented to hit LINQ, not added as general language features. One big example: declaration type inference is half-assed and only exists to facilitate anonymous types. They've had years since to clean up the design and haven't shown any indication of doing so.

(I still think C#'s the best out of the "mainstream" languages, but they could be doing a whole ton better.)

I know those papers, like any one that cares about compiler design should know.

As for MSR vs MS Corp, as you put it.

It is called Microsoft Systems Research, it is still a Microsoft unit, with researchers on Microsoft's payroll.

So it is plain and simple, Microsoft.

C# was first to introduce most mainstream functional concepts into C-like languages: generics, lambdas, LINQ etc.