Anders Hejlsberg

Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960) is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal, the chief architect of Delphi, and currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of the C# programming language.

Early life
Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark but did not graduate. While at the university in 1980 he began writing programs for the Nascom microcomputer, including a Pascal compiler which was initially marketed as the Blue Label Pascal compiler for the Nascom-2. However, he soon rewrote it for CP/M and MS-DOS, marketing it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. Later the product was licensed to Borland, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal system. Turbo Pascal competed with PolyPascal. The compiler itself was largely inspired by the "Tiny Pascal" compiler in Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", one of the most influential computer science books of the time. Anders and his partners ran a computer store in Copenhagen and marketed accounting systems. Their company, PolyData, was the distributor for Microsoft products in Denmark which put them at odds with Borland. Philippe Kahn and Anders first met in 1986. For all those years, Niels Jensen, one of Borland's founders and its majority shareholder, had successfully handled the relationship between Borland and PolyData.

At Borland
In Borland's hands, Turbo Pascal became the most commercially successful Pascal compiler ever. Hejlsberg remained with PolyData until the company came under financial stress, at which time, in 1989 he moved to California and became Chief Engineer at Borland. There he remained until 1996. During this time he developed Turbo Pascal further, and eventually he became the chief architect for the team which produced the replacement for Turbo Pascal, Delphi.

At Microsoft


In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined archrival Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; he also became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Technical Fellow. Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the C# programming language.

Awards
He received the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award for his work on Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Together with Shon Katzenberger, Scott Wiltamuth, Todd Proebsting, Erik Meijer, Peter Hallam and Peter Sollich, Anders was recently awarded a Technical Recognition Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement for their work on the C# language. A video about this is available at Outstanding Technical Achievement: C# Team.

Published work

 *  The C# Programming Language, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-33443-4, June 9, 2006
 *  The C# Programming Language, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-56299-2, October 18, 2008

Interviews

 * Software engineering radio Episode 97: Interview Anders Hejlsberg
 * Interview from .NET Developer's Journal, Vol 3 issue 2.
 * The C# Design Process
 * The Trouble with Checked Exceptions
 * Delegates, Components and Simplexity
 * Versioning, Virtual and Override
 * Contracts and Interoperability
 * Inappropriate Abstractions
 * Generics in C#, Java and C++
 * CLR Design Choices
 * Microsoft's Hejlsberg touts .NET, C-Omega (now LINQ) technologies
 * Deep Inside C#: An Interview with Microsoft Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg
 * C#: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
 * Video interview at channel9
 * Computerworld Interview with Anders on C#

Videos

 * Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg
 * Anders Hejlsberg - Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum
 * Anders Hejlsberg - What's so great about generics?
 * Anders Hejlsberg - Programming data in C# 3.0
 * Anders Hejlsberg - What brought about the birth of the CLR
 * Anders Hejlsberg - More C# Talk from C#'s Architect (Happy Birthday Video #3)
 * Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ
 * Anders Hejlsberg - Whiteboard with Anders Hejlsberg
 * Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ and Functional Programming
 * Outstanding Technical Achievement: C# Team
 * Anders Hejlsberg - The Future of C#
 * Anders Hejlsberg - The future of programming languages (JAOO Aarhus 2008)

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