From C++ to C#

 
In a new article on CIO.com Anders Hejlsberg tells next to a lot of other things how C# get's his name. Below a quote of the article:

[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.

From: http://blog.donnfelker.com/post/How-Did-C-Get-Its-Name.aspx