I disagree. Anders Hejlsberg was already an experienced language designer with the highly commercially successful Turbo Pascal and Delphi under his belt before he came to Microsoft and developed C#. James Gosling only had worked on Oak before Java, a language which never made it past the stage of an internal research project at Sun. It's disingenuous to say MS "copied" anyone in this case - they simply went out and found an experienced languages guru and hired him. Just like when they needed someone who knew about operating systems, they hired Dave Cutler from DEC.