Anders Hejlsberg - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Anders Hejlsberg is a prominent Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

software engineer

Software engineer

A software engineer is an engineer who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything containing software, such as computer chips, work.- Overview :...

who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

s and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal is a software development system that includes a compiler and an integrated development environment for the Pascal programming language running on CP/M, CP/M-86, and DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership...

, the chief architect of Delphi, and currently works for Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

as the lead architect of C#.

Early life

Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

, Denmark

Denmark

, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark

Technical University of Denmark

The Technical University of Denmark , often simply referred to as DTU, is a university just north of Copenhagen, Denmark. It was founded in 1829 at the initiative of Hans Christian Ørsted as Denmark's first polytechnic, and is today ranked among Europe's leading engineering institutions, and the...

but did not graduate. While at the university in 1980, he began writing programs for the Nascom

Nascom

The Nascom 1 and 2 were single-board computer kits issued in 1977 and 1979, respectively, based on the Zilog Z80 and including a keyboard and video interface, a serial port that could be used to store data on a tape cassette using the Kansas City standard, and two 8-bit parallel ports...

microcomputer

Microcomputer

A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. They are physically small compared to mainframe and minicomputers...

, including a Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

compiler which was initially marketed as the Blue Label Software Pascal for the Nascom-2. However, he soon rewrote it for CP/M

CP/M

CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...

and DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

, marketing it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. Later the product was licensed to Borland

Borland

Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...

, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal

system. Turbo Pascal competed with PolyPascal. The compiler itself was largely inspired by the "Tiny Pascal" compiler in Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984 he won the Turing Award for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.-Biography:Wirth...

's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programsis a 1976 book written by Niklaus Wirth covering some of the fundamental topics of computer programming, particularly that algorithms and data structures are inherently related...

", 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

Borland

. Philippe Kahn

Philippe Kahn

Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, who is credited with creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks. Kahn's first publicly shared picture is unique in that no other teams making the claim have any pictures. Kahn shot the first camera...

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 one of the most commercially successful Pascal compilers. 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 became the chief architect for the team which produced the replacement for Turbo Pascal, Delphi

Borland Delphi

Embarcadero Delphi is an integrated development environment for console, desktop graphical, web, and mobile applications.Delphi's compilers use its own Object Pascal dialect of Pascal and generate native code for 32- and 64-bit Windows operating systems, as well as 32-bit Mac OS X and iOS...

At Microsoft

In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft

Microsoft

. One of his first achievements was the J++

Visual J++

Visual J++ was Microsoft's specific implementation of Java. Syntax, keywords, and grammatical conventions were the same as Java's. Microsoft discontinued support of J++ in January 2004, replacing it to a certain extent with J# and C#....

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 language C#.

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

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

.

Together with Shon Katzenberger, Scott Wiltamuth, Todd Proebsting, Erik Meijer

Erik Meijer (computer scientist)

Erik Meijer is a Dutch computer scientist who is currently a software architect for Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. At Microsoft he heads the Cloud Programmability Team....

, 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 Microsoft Channel 9.

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
C# Programming Language (Covering C# 4.0), The (4th Edition) (Microsoft .NET Development Series),Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN-10: 0-321-74176-5, ISBN-13: 978-0-321-74176-9, October 2010

External links

Anders Hejlsberg: Technical Fellow
Microsoft's Anders Hejlsberg Receives Prestigious Excellence in Programming Award
2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award
JavaWorld of 1997 writes how Hejlsberg went to Microsoft: Microsoft offered Anders Hejlsberg a signing bonus of US$500,000 and stock options. Microsoft doubled the bonus to US$1,000,000 after Borland made a counter-offer. Hejlsberg left Borland in October 1996.

Interviews

Videos

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