This. C# was basically always meant to be "Java but done right". It came several years later, after Microsoft was legally barred from "EEE"-ing Java and required a direct competitor.
They didn't "steal" anything, iirc; they started as a legitimate licensee and then tried their usual embrace/extend/extinguish as "J++" (the EEE I mentioned). Sun sued for breach of license and won, barring Microsoft from extending Java outside of the (Sun-controlled) process. So they dropped it and built their own version, with blackjack and hookers.
But what I don’t get reading the original article is that they present how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.
> how to insert struct in an object oriented language as an intractable problem, whereas a good implementation with .net (as far as I can tell) has been out there for nearly 30 years. And C# was shameless about stealing from other languages.
I think (but may be wrong) their concerns are about the insert part. C# always had structs, Java wants to add them in a backward-compatible way. They want, for example, existing generic container classes pulled in from a .jar (i.e. already compiled) to support Java value types.
Well, my old code can have a List<Object>, and I can pass my new type into it and have it do some operations. Let alone with reflection - so backwards compatibility is more complex than that.
As for structs, Java avoids e.g. tearing issues with making them immutable, while it is easy to optimize it to local modification under the hood.
