The creator of four languages, Anders Hejlsberg, stands at the top of technology

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The creator of four languages, Anders Hejlsberg, stands at the top of technology

There have been thousands of programming languages throughout history, and only a few dozen are still popular. Across the software industry, language developers are rare; As the father of a language, you have been worshipped as a god; Among the gods, he created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript in programming languages over 40 years. He holds a place among Microsoft’s 22 Technical fellows who symbolize the pinnacle of technology. Anders Hejlsberg.

Borland – Turbo Pascal and Delphi

Early Anders was already seen as an IT superhero. Born in Copenhagen in 1960, he studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and created two hits, Turbo Pascal and Delphi, by the age of 36. Delphi, the successor to Turbo Pascal, is still the top 20 programming language today.

Beginning in his freshman year, Anders wrote a blue-coded Pascal compiler for the NASCOM-2, a single-board computer suite based on the Z80 CPU, to replace Microsoft Basic on the CPU. The development of the Pascal compiler is said to have been largely inspired by the Tiny Pascal compiler in Algorithms and Data Structures by Turing Prize-winning Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth.

Soon after, Anders rewrote Pascal for the microcomputer operating system CP/M and DOS, and marketed it under the brand polypcal. In 1983, PolyPascal was licensed to Borland and was integrated into an IDE by Borland, renamed Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal put Borland on the map and laid the foundation for Borland to become a world-renowned software company.

During 13 years at Borland, from licensing PolyPascal to Borland until his departure in 1996, he served as chief engineer and founder of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, Anders delivered a total of seven Turbo Pascal versions, and three Delphi versions. Anders’ influence on Borland is still in the memory of veteran programmers in the 1990s, who often miss Borland’s high-spirited chivalry and clever development tools.

At the height of Borland’s success, it also became a competitor to Microsoft in programming language compilers and programming development tools. Borland, one of the big three computer companies in the 1990s, joined Sun and Lotus in publicly criticizing Microsoft for its dominance in PCS.

But Borland, a rival to Microsoft, made an operating loss in 1994, had to be bailed out by asset sales and was rumoured to have slashed staff.

New journey – join Microsoft

Borland’s decline has given Microsoft an opportunity to recruit. Since late 1995, a succession of employees have left Borland to join Microsoft, including Anders, who joined Microsoft in October 1996.

Borland, struggling both internally and internally, sued Microsoft in May 1997, claiming that Microsoft had poached 34 key Borland employees with millions of dollars in signing bonuses and other incentives over a period of 30 months. The lawsuit has stirred up strong public opinion, and the media have reported under the headlines of “unfair competition”, “brain drain” and “talent grab”. Social also vivid spread of Microsoft to dig a variety of plot.

So why would Microsoft risk negative publicity by signing an expert like Anders? What role did Anders play in freeing Microsoft from the stranglehold of Sun, the computer giant?

In the mid-1990s, Sun developed the revolutionary programming language Java. Java became very popular because of its ability to “write once run Anywhere.” Netscape, which by then had 90% of the market, decided to work with Sun to run Java applets directly in the browser, and even considered embedding Java directly into web pages as a scripting language.

As a browser competitor, Microsoft can’t be left behind. So Microsoft got Sun’s license for Java and announced that it would run Java applets in IE3 as well. To support Java running on Windows, Microsoft needs experienced developers and experts, and Borland is home to that talent.

Programmers’ pet — C#

Joining Microsoft, Anders led the development of Visual J++ and was instrumental in the development of.net, Microsoft’s first cross-platform application development framework. However, when Sun sued Microsoft in October 1997 for violating the Java licensing terms of IE4, it was Anders who helped Microsoft escape Sun’s restrictions. As Bob Moglia, vice president of Microsoft’s server division and later CEO of Snowflake, recalled, “Only a handful of people in the world had the ability to develop languages and environments. Anders is at the top of the pyramid in this respect. He created C# with the same flair he used to create Turbo Pascal and Delphi.

Why did Anders leave Borland to join Microsoft? The stories being told have nothing to do with material things. During his time at Borland, Anders had generated considerable licensing income from the sales of Turbo Pascal and Delphi. In several interviews, Anders said that he joined Microsoft because he needed to try different things after 13 years.

C#, which began development in late 1998, is Microsoft’s latest attempt to break away from Sun. A few days after C# 1.0 was released, James Gosling, the founder of Java and then vice president of Sun, said, “I’m not losing sleep over Microsoft these days, even though the software giant is doing its best to curb Java’s influence with a language that looks like Java.” Still, Gosling admits that he and the rest of the company panicked when they first heard about the new language.

As chief architect of C#, Anders led the development of C#. C# is an object-oriented high-level programming language based on the.net framework. While inheriting the power of C and C++, C# strips away some of their complex features, making it an efficient and powerful programming language in the C language family. C# is based on the.net framework class library and has rapid development capabilities similar to Visual Basic.

Because of its versatility and easy-to-read syntax, C# has been favored by millions of people, making it the preferred choice for Web and mobile applications, game development, business applications, and more. Twenty years after its release, C#, one of the most widely used programming languages, remains in the top ten most popular languages. At the end of 2021, the CEO of Tiobe said C# is the most likely choice for language of the year, thanks to the resurgence of the former favorite in 2021.

C# also owes much of its popularity to its tendency to adopt new features quickly. In various versions of the programming language evolution, Anders brought his own experience and techniques to C# to add development-friendly killer features, such as the language integration query LINQ released in 3.0; Optional parameters released in 4.0; Read only automatic properties, expression body functions, Null conditional operators released in 6.0; And Switch expressions and Null merge assignments released in 8.0. As stated by Mads Torgersen, the current C# Lead Designer, it is this forward-looking design that has allowed C# to accumulate such a large user base in 20 years.

The foundation and forward-looking nature of C# also led Microsoft to create Blazor as a cutting-edge project. After three years of development, Blazor “Build client web apps with C#” was officially released by Microsoft on May 19, 2020 at the annual tech conference Build. With WebAssembly technology and Blazor, it is now possible to build interactive Web uis in C# instead of JavaScript. Making C# a language that can be executed on the server as well as in the browser.

In 2001, Anders received the prestigious Dr. Dobb award for outstanding programming for his contributions to the development of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and Microsoft.net frameworks.

In 2007, Anders and his team received the Microsoft Technology Recognition Award. In the same year, he became one of Microsoft’s 22 super-brains and top Technical fellows.

Age 52 – Typescript

In 2012, 10 years after the release of C# 1.0, Anders was 52. At this time, the technical community, he is still full of attention and expectations. ZDNet published two articles, “what’s the next big thing from the father of Microsoft C#?” Can the father of C# free us from Javascript? “Is TypeScript version 0.8, which will be released for the first time in October 2012.

What impact will Anders have on developers and Microsoft this time around?

In late 2010, Anders began developing TypeScript. At the time, the Web world was in the midst of a perfect storm: from a windows-dominated desktop to the emergence of a variety of hardware and operating systems that made cross-platform a necessity; Google’s V8 engine, meanwhile, has improved Javascript tenfold. With HTML5 coming into place, writing apps in the browser is not only necessary, but possible.

However, just when developers were ready to make their mark, they were hampered by some JavaScript flaws. JavaScript has no classes, no modules, and especially no type system, which limits the development of large applications. Because browsers only supported JavaScript, and there was no substitute for JavaScript, how to solve this problem was a challenge.

Before TypeScript came along, Microsoft tried to fix this problem with a tool called Script#. When asked, Anders offered a different opinion. He argues that you can’t experience JavaScript best practices by using another language. Instead, it should be based on JavaScript to solve its own flaws. The key is to add a type system to JavaScript without compromising its unique flexibility, simplicity, and dynamic nature.

TypeScript is designed to develop large applications, and TypeScript can be translated into JavaScript. Since TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, any existing JavaScript program is a legitimate TypeScript program. After two years of internal development, Microsoft first released TypeScript version 0.8 in October 2012.

Today, TypeScript is a popular programming language for building large applications in browsers. Since its release, it has become more and more popular among developers. TypeScript ranked third in Stack Overflow’s 2021 survey. And it’s still on the rise. TypeScript’s success can be seen in another way. Around the same time that TypeScript was being developed, Facebook introduced Flow as a solution. Today, however, the two trends are very different. TypeScript’s Star on GitHub has grown to over 60,000 per year, while Flow is still hovering around 20,000. In addition, the number of daily downloads over the past year has also varied dramatically. Flow runs in the hundreds of thousands per day and TypeScript runs in the 20-30 million range.

TypeScript’s mission is not to solve the problems of developing large applications using JavaScript. It helps Microsoft overcome its fear of open source.

Open Source – Leveraging the Javascript community

As we all know, Microsoft is now the biggest player in open source. However, Microsoft also has a well-known history of fear of open source. When TypeScript was being developed, Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft’s CEO, in 2001 called Linux, the open source operating system, a “malignant tumor” because it was attached to everything related to intellectual property. Fifteen years later, Ballmer declared his love of open source and Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, but when TypeScript was being developed, the company’s top brass were still fearful of open source.

Anders believes in open source and has a unique open source philosophy, which is why TypeScript has been open source since day 0. Anders believes that putting code in an open place for people to copy and deal with Issues is technically open source and does not reflect the essence of open source. Open development means you want to make the whole process of development public.

Open development is also essential to TypeScript. Anders says TypeScript was initially built as an idea, a prototype, and that feedback from the JavaScript community is needed to improve JavaScript practices. And the only way to appeal to the JavaScript community is to open source.

In 2014, TypeScript moved its code to GitHub and became completely “open”. For the TypeScript team, GitHub is the place to work. There, they are so close to the user, the user can see the code the team has written in real time, there is no distortion between them, and the user can communicate more quickly.

However, when Anders made TypeScript open source, Microsoft executives were reluctant, and Andrers and his team did a lot of convincing. At the same time, Microsoft softened its stance on open source after 2012 as Azure entered the company’s portfolio. As a result, TypeScript has helped overcome the fear of open source within Microsoft and promoted its open source culture, which has become the consensus within the industry.

TheNewStack, a tech publication that recently interviewed Anders, compared the old record label Motown to Microsoft today. If Motown had legendary artists like Stevie, Smokey, Marvin and Michael Jackson in its heyday, Microsoft’s revival under CEO Nadella also has a hit songwriter behind it. His name is Anders Hejlsberg.

Anders is admirable not only for continuing to break new ground on the same subject over a span of four decades; It is also because, although she is 60 years old, she is still immersed in the front line of research and development, which brings warmth, inspiration and inspiration to countless people. In today’s rapid iteration of knowledge and products, should practitioners stop and think that the experience and insights accumulated over time, like many experiences and wisdom in the long history, will surely bring value across the age boundary?

In 2019, four wordsmiths, aged between 55 and 60, gathered at a fundraiser for CS4All. The language they created still tops the charts today, and they themselves remain active opinion representatives and practitioners. As their peers, they can’t help but look at their current high-brain learning activities and admire them.