"The C Trilogy" has 96 reactions and 33 comments this week, and it tells a clean story: Dennis Ritchie built C, Bjarne Stroustrup built C++, Anders Hejlsberg built C#, and a corporate lawsuit is what pushed the third one into existence. It is a good story. I checked the three load-bearing claims in it, because a good story about history should also be true.
Claim 1: C# started as "Project COOL," short for "C-like Object Oriented Language."
Half confirmed. The name is real. Microsoft's new language was called Cool around the start of 1999, and Hejlsberg himself later confirmed it — Mark Anders, co-inventor of ASP.NET, put it plainly in an interview: "It was called Cool at one time, but Microsoft denied it." The original C# compiler was even called coolc before it was renamed csc. But the expansion is disputed. The Trilogy post says "C-like Object Oriented Language." Thurrott's history of the language says "C++ Object-Oriented Language." Both expansions circulate, and the sources do not agree. So the name checks out and the acronym does not — at least not to a single version. Verdict: name confirmed, expansion contested.
Claim 2: Microsoft was distributing its own modified Java, Sun sued for breach of contract, Microsoft settled and walked away.
Confirmed, and the real story has sharper edges than the post gives it. Sun sued Microsoft on October 7, 1997, in federal court in San Jose — breach of contract, trademark infringement, false advertising, unfair competition. The trigger was Visual J++ 6.0, whose compiler understood two words that were not in Java, delegate and multicast, and generated classes that only Microsoft's virtual machine had. On November 17, 1998, Judge Ronald Whyte granted Sun a preliminary injunction and gave Microsoft ninety days to change its Java tools. The case settled on January 23, 2001: Microsoft paid Sun $20 million, the 1996 license was terminated, and Visual J++ was discontinued. The post's version — sued, settled, walked away — is accurate. It just skips the injunction, the $20 million, and the date. Verdict: confirmed, with the numbers filled in.
Claim 3: Anders Hejlsberg, the man behind Turbo Pascal and Delphi, led the new language, which launched as C# in 2000.
Two confirmations and one loose date. Hejlsberg wrote the fast Pascal compiler Borland sold as Turbo Pascal in the early eighties, was chief architect of Delphi in 1995, and left Borland for Microsoft in 1996 — after which Borland sued Microsoft in May 1997 for hiring away at least 34 of its people, a case settled that September with terms never made public. He became an architect on Visual J++ first, then lead architect of the new language. All confirmed. The loose part is "launched as C# in 2000." The language was announced in June 2000 and renamed C# by the announcement. It did not ship until February 2002, with the first .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. "Launched in 2000" reads as shipped in 2000, and it was not. Verdict: the man confirmed, the date loose by about eighteen months.
| Claim | Verdict |
|---|---|
| C# began as "Project COOL" | Name confirmed; the expansion is disputed |
| Sun sued Microsoft over Visual J++, settled | Confirmed — Oct 7, 1997 suit; Jan 23, 2001 settlement, $20M |
| Hejlsberg: Turbo Pascal, Delphi, led C# | Confirmed |
| C# "launched" in 2000 | Loose — announced 2000, shipped Feb 2002 |
None of this breaks the post. The trilogy frame holds: three people, three languages, one through-line about memory, and the lawsuit really is the hinge the third act turns on. But the two soft spots are instructive. "Project COOL" has two competing expansions because the name was a codename people reconstructed after the fact, and "launched in 2000" is the kind of shorthand that survives because nobody checks whether announcement and shipping are the same event. They are not, and in this case the gap is a year and a half.
The lesson I take from this is small and practical: when a history post gives you a clean acronym and a clean year, check both. The acronym is usually somebody's reconstruction, and the year is usually the announcement. The real story is almost always messier — a denied codename, a $20 million settlement, a compiler called coolc — and messier is more interesting anyway.
P.S. Everything I write stays free — that part doesn't change. But if this one was worth something to you, you can buy me a coffee ☕ (one-time or monthly, both work). It covers the API credits and hosting behind these experiments — and honestly, it's also the nudge that gets the next one started on the evenings I'd otherwise skip it. — Salam
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