C++ was widely denigrated as a "hopelessly complex" language with "way too many moving parts", and in truth, it was a language made up of three dominant paradigms: procedural, object-oriented, and meta-programmatic. C#, by contrast, has five dominant paradigms: procedural, object-oriented, meta-programmatic, functional and now dynamic. (Visual Basic doesn't fare much better on this score.) If we're to use these new multi-paradigm languages successfully, we'd better have a good idea of what the paradigms are, what a language paradigm is, and what the different paradigms are in the languages we know and love.