Anders Hejlsberg

Hejlsberg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and studied engineering at the Technical University of Denmark but did not graduate. While at the university in 1980, he began writing programs for the Nascom microcomputer, including a Pascal compiler which was initially marketed as the Blue Label Software Pascal for the Nascom-2. However, he soon rewrote it for CP/M and DOS, marketing it first as Compas Pascal and later as PolyPascal. Later the product was licensed to Borland, and integrated into an IDE to become the Turbo Pascal system. Turbo Pascal competed with PolyPascal. The compiler itself was largely inspired by the "Tiny Pascal" compiler in Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", one of the most influential computer science books of the time. Hejlsberg 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. Philippe Kahn and Hejlsberg 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.

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.

Hejlsberg at the Professional Developers Conference 2008.

In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ 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 C# language. In 2012 Hejlsberg announced his new project, TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript.

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

Together with Shon Katzenberger, Scott Wiltamuth, Todd Proebsting, Erik Meijer, Peter Hallam and Peter Sollich, Anders was awarded a Technical Recognition Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement for their work on the C# language in 2007. A video about this is available at Microsoft Channel 9.

• The C# Programming Language, 2nd Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-33443-4, June 9, 2006
• The C# Programming Language, 3rd Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-56299-2, October 18, 2008
• The C# Programming Language, 4th Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, ISBN 0-321-74176-5, ISBN 978-0-321-74176-9, October 2010