Although I have never met Heijlsberg myself, I have a good friend on the C# team and have met many people who work on programming languages at Microsoft. My und

Although I have never met Heijlsberg myself, I have a good friend on the C# team and have met many people who work on programming languages at Microsoft. My understanding is that Heijlsberg and team are very much in line with the MS culture. Well, the DevDiv culture at least. The fundamental thing to understand here is that Microsoft is a very large company which has has evolved into many subcultures over time. DevDiv, or the Developer Division, is by far the most progressive of these. It's the old "Raymond Chen vs MSDN Magazine" thing (Google it). C#, however, is just so great because of people like Heijlsberg, Erik Meijer, Mads Torgersen, Eric Lippert, and many many others who are brilliant, bring outside ideas, but still operate within the very successful mindset of DevDiv which birthed Visual Basic and Visual Studio. Side note: I've noticed that I've become a little bit of a Microsoft apologist on HN lately. Receiving a paycheck from them has a little bit to do with it, but the truth of the matter is that I am trying to understand why they are so successful and where they fail. If you keep your eyes open and ears tuned, you can learn a lot about software and business at Microsoft. I'm also trying to share this knowledge a bit, because HN is a place where the knowledge is appreciated. Slashdot? Not so much.