"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.…