How Did C# Get Its Name?

It’s an interesting name to say the least. Why the “sharp” symbol? Sometimes newcomers get it incorrect at first (usually people BRAND NEW to programming) and call it “C POUND”. It Almost sounds like a hip-hop thing as the “pound” word has different context in that arena.

The knocking of fists as a form of greeting, departure or respect. – Urban Dictionary

But, alas, this is NOT what it means in terms of programming.

Here’s Where The Name Came From

In the October 3rd 2008 edition of the CIO article “The A-Z of Programming Languages: C#” Naomi Hamilton interviewed the men of men, the one and only, Anders Hejlsberg (lead architect of C# – and other languages Pre c#). In this article he described where the name came from. The C# language was originally called “Cool” but it was changed. Here’s the scoop:

[CIO] Why was the language originally named Cool, and what promoted the change to C#?

[AH] The code name was Cool, which stood for ‘C like Object Oriented Language’. We kind of liked that name: all of our files were called .cool and that was kind of cool! We looked seriously at keeping the name for the final product but it was just not feasible from a trademark perspective, as there were way too many cool things out there.

So the naming committee had to get to work and we sort of liked the notion of having an inherent reference to C in there, and a little word play on C++, as you can sort of view the sharp sign as four pluses, so it’s C++++. And the musical aspect was interesting too. So C# it was, and I’ve actually been really happy with that name. It’s served us well.

Make sense?