I recall Anders giving a talk (at JAOO maybe?) saying that the big jumps in between C# 1.0 -> 2.0 and especially 2.0 -> 3.0 caused some push back. People compla

I recall Anders giving a talk (at JAOO maybe?) saying that the big jumps in between C# 1.0 -> 2.0 and especially 2.0 -> 3.0 caused some push back. People complained that they were changing the language too fast and it was causing knowledge churn. So 4.0 was more 'targeted' in scope as a result of this feedback. I know dynamic was a 'big' feature, but it was mostly in it's own corner and had little application to most daily code. .NET 4 introduced Task<T> and the TPL which was very important but it didn't see any assitance from C# itself. As to C# 5.0, I am assuming that the managed languages team at MS was well into designing and implementing roslyn and probably didn't see great value is contributing massive features to the old compliler, but Async/Await couldn't, well uhh, wait for roslyn to be finished.