Anders Hejlsberg
Biography
Anders Hejlsberg is a Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular programming languages and development tools. He is best known as the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi and C#.
Hejlsberg studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark but left before completing his degree to work on software. In the early 1980s, he wrote a Pascal compiler for the Nascom microcomputer, which later became the commercial product Turbo Pascal. That compiler was acquired by Borland in 1983, and Hejlsberg joined the company. At Borland he led the development of Turbo Pascal and later created Delphi, a rapid application development environment using Object Pascal.
In 1996, Hejlsberg moved to Microsoft, where he initially worked on Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes. He then became the lead architect of the C# programming language, which debuted in 2000 as part of the .NET Framework. Hejlsberg has continued to guide the evolution of C# through versions 2.0 to the present, and also contributed to the design of TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript.
Contributions
Hejlsberg's work has been influential in both the early microcomputer software industry and the modern enterprise software landscape. His key contributions include:
- Creating the first widely used integrated development environment for Pascal (Turbo Pascal).
- Pioneering component-based rapid application development with Delphi.
- Designing C# as a modern, object-oriented language that combined features from C++, Java, and Delphi while introducing innovations such as LINQ and async/await.
- Helping to define the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) standard.
Awards
Hejlsberg has received multiple industry awards, including the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award in 2001 and being named a Microsoft Technical Fellow. He was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows in 2015.