C# (pronounced see sharp, like the musical note C♯, but written with the number sign) is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language encompassing strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented (class-based), and component-oriented programming disciplines. It was developed around 2000 by Microsoft as part of its .NET initiative, and later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2018). Mono is the name of the free and open-source project to develop a compiler and runtime for the language. C# is one of the programming languages designed for the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). C# was designed by Anders Hejlsberg, and its development team is currently led by Mads Torgersen. The most recent version is 8.0, which was released in 2019 alongside Visual Studio 2019 version 16.3.