This internview with "Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg" is pretty interesting. I'd read it a while back, but didn't think about it for a while until I saw he was headlining with D. Bill Gates at the Visual Studio .NET Launch coming up around mid-Feb.

This is a bit of what brought on the "weather predicting toasters" thread from which I posted a snippet on 11/15. Anders quotes Gosling grossly outta context with "[Gosling] said, yeah, the whole write-once-run-anywhere, 100%-pure-thing was a really goofy idea, and was more of a marketing thing. " It seems to be an attempt by Anders to claim that C# is not a Java clone ("First of all, C# is not a Java clone. In the design of C#, we looked at a lot of languages. We looked at C++, we looked at Java, at Modula 2, C, and we looked at Smalltalk") by showing how Java is "goofy" and (in other parts of the article) C# is, um, anti-goofy.

I don't think there's any denying that C# is a pretty spiffy language, but as one /. poster put it (okay okay, it was me):
"No matter how many times MS wants to claim C# isn't a Java clone, the point is it's a well-done language based on lessons learned by programmers who are familiar with Java"

My biases aside, it's a pretty interesting interview.