Regarding LINQ: I really like certain parts of it, dislike others (mainly inline Select-statements and the EntityFramework built on top of it), but I'd be hard-pressed to call it the greatest invention of any time. PEP 255 laid the ground work for similar language features in 2001, and I doubt that the python guys "invented" all of that out of thin air (cf. Reference #4 in the PEP).
What you can argue is that LINQ made this stuff available to more developers (with useful syntax and in a statically typed language, which also must have taken a lot of work), but filter/map/reduce have been around for quite a while.
That obviously doesn't make it less useful or the underlying tech less impressive though.
What you can argue is that LINQ made this stuff available to more developers (with useful syntax and in a statically typed language, which also must have taken a lot of work), but filter/map/reduce have been around for quite a while.
That obviously doesn't make it less useful or the underlying tech less impressive though.