Not just having a standard but being able to collectively evolve a standard.
In the absence of that, Pascal’s creators and commercializers invented follow-on languages, including the most successful thread via Hejlsberg as we’re discussing here: Object Pascal -> Delphi -> C#/.NET—with a brief detour to J++, which I don’t know enough about to understand if it belongs in this sequence.
Outside Borland and Apple, people tend to forget that already in 1976, Niklaus Wirth came up with Modula-2, exactly to fix all the shortcomings from a language originally designed for teaching, with one properly designed for systems programing from the start.
As for your sequence, from someone that was around back then, .NET and C# only exist as you know it thanks to Sun's lawsuit regarding Java language and runtime extensions introduced in J++.
Then an internal research language originally named Cool, became C#, the language extensions in J++ were made into C# features (events, J/Direct, COM interop), Windows Foundation Classes became Windows Forms, and J# was released in .NET 1.0 as transiton technology.
Had it not been for the lawsuit, Ext-VOS (.NET codename) would have been released with J++ instead.
In the absence of that, Pascal’s creators and commercializers invented follow-on languages, including the most successful thread via Hejlsberg as we’re discussing here: Object Pascal -> Delphi -> C#/.NET—with a brief detour to J++, which I don’t know enough about to understand if it belongs in this sequence.
As for your sequence, from someone that was around back then, .NET and C# only exist as you know it thanks to Sun's lawsuit regarding Java language and runtime extensions introduced in J++.
Then an internal research language originally named Cool, became C#, the language extensions in J++ were made into C# features (events, J/Direct, COM interop), Windows Foundation Classes became Windows Forms, and J# was released in .NET 1.0 as transiton technology.
Had it not been for the lawsuit, Ext-VOS (.NET codename) would have been released with J++ instead.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
Follow the linked paper for Ext-VOS, aka COM+ Runtime, aka .NET.
Microsoft would revisit this COM+ Runtime a decade later with WinRT,
https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...