The guy who invented that syntax was J.J. Allaire. Bill Gates passed on his advisors recommendation and didn't buy Allaire because he thought the price was too high. Instead he bought a company in Hawaii building what became ASP.net. However he was quite impressed with J.J.

But years later when J.J. started a second company, it was only a few weeks old when Gates swept in and bought it for millions of dollars.. Shut it down and moved everyone to Seattle.. He immediately assigned J.J. and his team to build a new project called Azure.