I suspect that it's not an issue of respect so much as an issue of governance. C# remains a commercial language, wholly owned by a single corporate entity. That, I think, allows its maintainers some luxuries that community languages don't enjoy. Chief among them is a whole team of full-time language designers and implementers who can sustain a sort of deep concentration 40-ish hours a week for years on end. I'm pretty sure it's closing in on a decade that there's been talk about how to implement pattern matching into C#, and I'm absolutely sure that a lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into it. But that kind of effort is more manageable, on a personal level, if you're getting paid to do it and if most the thornier bits of the process are happening in a private-ish space and among a small group of people you know well.
By contrast, with a community language where these decisions are made in public, by committee, and perhaps by a team of volunteers, it seems like things are always just a bit more strained. I'm sure some of the more famous PEPs took a huge personal toll on GvR, and there's no doubt that they caused a lot of high emotions. I see similarly troublesome patterns in Nim and Scala, where it would seem that "trying to avoid too much conflict with people who are forcefully communicating strongly held opinions over a medium like the Internet where it's difficult to modulate emotions" can be a real factor in the decision of what language features to include and how. And, in that kind of environment, it's probably particularly difficult to keep the Internet, with all its . . . Internetiness, at bay for long enough to really make sure you've got all the details dialed in right. Much easier, I imagine, to go for the punt and get the whole business over with.
Technically it's owned by .NET Foundation now, but admittedly it's composed of MSFT people by a large part. Also, language design happens on GitHub, and the community is encouraged to get involved.
As long as Microsoft finances the .NET/C# team, neither runtime/libraries nor the language will include anything which does not fit in their strategies/vision. The .NET Foundation will not change anything here. And that is good. The .NET Foundation ensures that the product is legally usable on Linux/Macs/other non Windows platforms and additionally helps the ecosystem.
Yes. Actually that fact is more interesting than it looks.
It's all of our good fortune that it's in YC's interests to fund HN just as it is, with the moderators' primary job being to keep it interesting and hopefully keep the community happy. If HN were a startup, we would have to play the growth-hacking game. If it were the media property of some larger corporation, some manager would eventually put a monetization squeeze on it. Either of those tactics would ruin this place, whether or not they succeeded.
YC doesn't need us to do such things because a happy HN is the most valuable-to-YC HN. It's basically an accident—a dual accident of how YC's business works and how things historically developed—that we ended up in that spot. It's a special position to be in, and our first responsibility is to preserve it. Hence our motto, Move slowly and preserve things.
It's not that late to the game, considering its paradigm. How many other large object-oriented imperative languages have it? Not C++ or Objective-C or Java. Kotlin has destructuring, but not full pattern matching.
Wish more language designers would respect code authors like these designers do.