People at Microsoft would probably agree. In 1996 they hired Borland's chief engineer Anders Hejlsberg, who designed Turbo Pascal and Delphi at Borland, and C# and Typescript at Microsoft.
Actually it is a bit more nuanced than that, Anders Hejlsberg was so pissed with Borland's management that he finally accepted the occasional invites from ex-Borland people working at Microsoft.
He tells the story in this interview,
"Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language"
By the way, he also contributed to J++, that where P/Invoke, events, Windows Forms, properties came from initially (Yes, Delphi also had events and propertiers by then).
Well, he adapted Clascal & Object Pascal from Lisa & Macintosh to the DOS/Windows PC world, and added a couple features from CLOS to turn it into Delphi, and married that with Sun’s C++-syntax bytecode-compiled variant of Objective-C to produce C#.
He certainly deserves credit for what he did, but not what those whose shoulders he stood on did.
Actually to produce J++, followed by a lawsuit, which made cool from MSR become C#, and J# come into existence to ease the porting from J++ code into C#.
Ironically 20 years later, Microsoft is again a Java vendor, and OpenJDK contributor.
