Anders Hejlsberg
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Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960[1]) is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He currently works for Microsoft, where he is the lead architect of the C# programming language.
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[edit] Early life
Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark but did not graduate[1]. Whilst at 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 "Algorithms and Data Structures = Programs" one of the most influential 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 had successfully handled the relationship between Borland and Polydata.
[edit] 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.
[edit] At Microsoft
Hejlsberg became one of the key targets for Microsoft and in a succession of offers, Borland could not match the offer made by 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Published work
- The C# Programming Language, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-33443-4 , June 9, 2006
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hejlsberg states in a video at the Microsoft Museum that his birthdate is 1960, but most other sources say 1961. At TechEd 2006 in Barcelona, Anders confirmed his birthdate as December 1960
[edit] External links
- Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg Receives Prestigious Excellence in Programming Award
- 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award
[edit] Interviews
- 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
[edit] 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
