This claim is absurd. In the last few years Microsoft has done more to advance the state-of-the-art in programming languages for practicing developers than any

This claim is absurd. In the last few years Microsoft has done more to advance the state-of-the-art in programming languages for practicing developers than any other organization. In terms of industrial languages, C# and the .NET framework are a huge advance for client-side programmers developing Windows GUI applications compared to C++. They sponsor the open source development of IronPython and IronRuby and make a genuine effort to maintain compatibility w/ the reference C implementations. As for functional languages, they largely sponsor the development of Haskell by paying Simon Peyton-Jones who works for Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/), and have released F# which is by far the best commercially supported functional language. Of course the trade off is that their languages work best, or only, with Windows, but if you are stuck programming on Windows, Microsoft is going out of its way to give developers a lot of options in languages.