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Anders Hejlsberg

 
Anders Hejlsberg

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Anders Hejlsberg



 
 
Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960) is a prominent Danish
Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries....
 software engineer
Software engineer

A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything with software such as chips work....
 who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the chief architect of Delphi, and currently works for Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
 as the lead architect of the C# programming language.

sberg was born in Copenhagen
Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban area with a population of 1,153,615 . Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager....
, Denmark
Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries....
, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark
Technical University of Denmark

The Technical University of Denmark was founded in 1829 as the 'College of Advanced Technology' . The initiative was taken by the renowned physicist Hans Christian ?rsted who also served as its Principal until his death in 1851....
 but did not graduate.






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Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960) is a prominent Danish
Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries....
 software engineer
Software engineer

A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything with software such as chips work....
 who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the chief architect of Delphi, and currently works for Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
 as the lead architect of the C# programming language.

Early life

Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen
Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban area with a population of 1,153,615 . Copenhagen is situated on the Islands of Zealand and Amager....
, Denmark
Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries....
, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark
Technical University of Denmark

The Technical University of Denmark was founded in 1829 as the 'College of Advanced Technology' . The initiative was taken by the renowned physicist Hans Christian ?rsted who also served as its Principal until his death in 1851....
 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 computer keyboard and video interface, a serial port that could be used for storing data on a compact audio cassette using the Kansas City standard, and two 8-bit parallel communications....
 microcomputer
Microcomputer

A microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. Another general characteristic of these computers is that they occupy physically small amounts of space when compared to mainframe computer and minicomputers....
, 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
CP/M

CP/M is an operating system originally created for Intel 8080/Intel 8085 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. Initially confined to single tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations, and were migrated to 16-bit processors....
 and MS-DOS
MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the main operating system for personal computers during the 1980s....
, marketing it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. Later the product was licensed to Borland
Borland

Borland Software Corporation is a Computer software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn....
, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal

Turbo Pascal is a complete software development system that includes a compiler and an Integrated Development Environment for the Pascal programming language running under CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS, developed by Borland under Philippe Kahn's leadership....
 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 Switzerland computer science, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal , and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering....
's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is a book written by Niklaus Wirth covering some of the fundamental topics of computer programming. The book was published by Prentice-Hall in 1976 and is one of the most influential computer science books of the time....
", 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

Borland Software Corporation is a Computer software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn....
. Philippe Kahn
Philippe Kahn

Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, credited for creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks ....
 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 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
Borland Delphi

Delphi is a software development environment for Microsoft Windows applications. It has always supported development of native Windows applications in the Delphi programming language, a further development of Object Pascal....
.

At Microsoft

In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined archrival Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes
Visual J++

Visual J++ was Microsoft's specific implementation of Java . Optimized for the Microsoft Windows, J++ programs could only run on the MSJVM , which was Microsoft's attempt at a faster Interpreter ....
; 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.

Awards

He received the 2001 Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award for his work on Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and the Microsoft .NET
.NET Framework

The Microsoft .NET Framework is a software framework that is available with several Microsoft Windows operating systems. It includes a large Library of coded solutions to prevent common programming problems and a virtual machine that manages the execution of programs written specifically for the Software framework....
 Framework.

Together with Shon Katzenberger, Scott Wiltamuth, Todd Proebsting, Erik Meijer
Erik Meijer (computer scientist)

Erik Meijer is a Netherlands computer scientist who is currently a software architect for Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework....
, 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 .

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
Hejls

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