Anders Hejlsberg Biography

Anders Hejlsberg is quite a famous personality, being a Technical Fellow in the Developer Division of Microsoft, Hejlsberg is popularly known as the influential creator of development tools and various programming languages. He’s a chief designer of C# programming language as well as a key participant in the development of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Since its release in 2000, the C# programming language has actually gained huge adoption and now is standardized by ISO and ECMA.

Anders Hejlsberg is a popular Danish programming engineer born on 2nd December 1960. He designed many popular and successful programming languages as well as development tools. Anders was the original author of the Turbo Pascal and a key architect of Delphi. Currently, he is working for Microsoft company as a lead architect of C# & core developer at TypeScript.

Anders Hejlsberg Biography

Before connecting with Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg was an employee of Borland International Inc. Being a principal engineer, Turbo Pascal was originally written by Anders Hejlsberg, an integrated development, and architect of the successor, Delphi.

Early & Career Life

Anders studied engineering at Denmark’s Technical University but didn’t graduate. Though in 1980, he started writing various programs for the Nascom microcomputer, which includes the Pascal compiler that was marketed as a Blue Label Software for Nascom-2. But, soon he rewrote this for DOS and CP/M, marketing it as Compas Pascal & then as PolyPascal.

After that, this product was given a license at Borland, and then integrated into IDE which became the Turbo Pascal system. PolyPascal was in competition with Turbo Pascal. The compiler was highly inspired by “Tiny Pascal” compiler “Algorithms and Data Structures = Programs by in Niklaus Wirth”, an influential computer book of that time.

Anders Hejlsberg with his partners ran the computer store located in Copenhagen & marketed accounting systems. The company, PolyData, was a key distributor for various Microsoft products in Denmark that put it at Borland. Hejlsberg and Philippe Kahn met first in 1986. For those initial years, Jensen Niels, who was Borland’s founder and majority shareholder, had handled this relationship between Borland & PolyData successfully.

Life at Borland

In hands of Borland, Turbo Pascal became a huge hit commercially as a Pascal compiler ever.  Anders Hejlsberg stayed with PolyData till his company came under financial stress, during that time, he shifted to California and there he became the Chief Engineer in Borland. There he stayed until 1996. At this time he went ahead and developed Turbo Pascal, and became a lead architect for his team that produced a replacement for the Turbo Pascal, Delphi.

Life at Microsoft

Anders left Borland in 1996 to join Microsoft. His achievements were J++ programming language & Windows Foundation Classes; soon he became a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer & Technical Fellow. Since 2000, Anders was the chief architect of his team developing the C# programming language.

2 thoughts on “Anders Hejlsberg Biography”

  1. Please check the post and correct some typos of “Andres” to “Anders”. In the “Life of Microsoft” section, what do you mean by “archrival” in the sentence of “Andres left Borland in 1996 to join archrival Microsoft.” ?

    Again, please check the word spelling.

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