Anders Hejlsberg (
@ahejlsberg) is a living legend: he created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript (and today TypeScript is the most-used programming language, globally, as per GitHub.)
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
02:48 How Anders got into programming
05:40 Building his first compiler
07:44 Turbo Pascal
12:25 Delphi
14:53 Joining Microsoft
19:41 Building C#
29:11 Async/await
34:01 The rise of JavaScript
37:52 Building TypeScript
42:58 How the TypeScript compiler works
48:30 JavaScript’s strengths and weaknesses
52:18 How Anders uses AI
56:03 What language features work well with AI
1:02:49 How software craftsmanship is changing
1:07:49 Performance and efficiency
1:09:29 Anders’ tool stack
1:11:30 A 30-year career at Microsoft
1:13:40 Book recommendation
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Four things that stood out to me:
1. “10x better for 1/10th of the price” is a proven winner.
This is what Turbo Pascal did: it sold for $49.95 when competing compilers cost $500, and it was faster and more interactive than competitors’ products. Conveniently, the low price tag also killed off piracy
2. C# might have not existed without a famous court case.
Microsoft originally hired Anders to architect its Java tools (Visual J ), but the Sun versus Microsoft lawsuit (1997-2001) meant Microsoft could not build on top of Java, as the company that owned Java’s IP (Sun) sued MS for alleged unauthorized changes to the Java language. Microsoft realized it had to build a new language that combined VB’s productivity with C ’s power. This led to C# and .NET.
3. TypeScript exists because Anders refused to build Script# for the Outlook .com team.
Microsoft’s Outlook .com team asked Anders’ C# team to productize “ScriptSharp,” a language to cross-compile C# to JavaScript. Anders and the C# team pushed back, suggesting that a better approach was to fix JavaScript. Anders felt strongly that to be attractive to the best-of-breed developers in the JavaScript ecosystem, you want people to write JavaScript, and not another language like C#.
4. Designing a programming language is a 10-year play.
As Anders puts it: “Version one is great, but has all sorts of issues. You’ve got to do version two, but it’s not until version three that it really starts to be great. Then you’ve got to convince people to adopt it.”