From Turbo Pascal to Delphi to C# to TypeScript, an interview with PL legend Anders Hejlsberg

Thanks much to Anders for the interview!

0:00 Video foreword
0:20 Introduction & current work
1:06 Getting into programming languages & Turbo Pascal
2:11 Lessons from early personal computing
3:26 Borland experience
4:36 Delphi
6:34 Graphical programming languages
7:54 Switch to Microsoft & background for .NET
9:56 C# in the context of Java
11:18 Classes vs structs & value objects
14:16 Getting into TypeScript
17:02 Surprising success
18:19 JS functional programming & TS feature set
19:55 Common Language Runtime & language vs platform
22:18 Future impact of machine learning on programming
24:02 Closing words

[jaakkosalmenius]

Great person! Past 30 years I have basically only used languages written by Anders: Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and TypeScript

[AbhinavKulshreshtha]

Amazing interview. I love these old school stories.

[shimadabr]

It's pretty awesome this background "presentation" you do during the interview. Scrolling through wiki pages and other resources so we can even go on our own to deepen our understanding of the subjects being talked about.

[phenanrithe]

C# is one of the best well-thought languages which continued to evolve in the right direction, congrats to everyone who worked on it!

[BadQuanta]

Thanks for this interview. I appreciated Turbo Pascal deeply. This has peaked my interest in TypeScript. I have been using CoffeeScript but I think it could use better tooling too.

[troyfrei]

I go back in the old turbo Pascal. As a Kid who had No money, I can remember paying less than $50.00 (from a ad out of Byte Mag?). I can remember the other Compilers costed Thousands in the 1980s. I can remember buying a video of David I on how to program in Delphi. I love Charles Calvert book on Delphi. I still LOVE Delphi. I was hopping Microsoft would buy Delphi one day. Thank you Mr Anders Hejlsberg for making a great product call Delphi.

[cabc]

I started with BASIC like all the kids that were introduced to home computers in the early 80's. But my first structured language with a PC was Turbo Pascal. That thing was fast!, had an IDE with a debugger and compiled programs faster than most languages today. Then, after doing briefly some VB (and hating it) Delphi wasborn. Delphi was awesome, it was object oriented Pascal with the good parts of VB and Turbo Pascal combined. Tragically, a year later all the hype of Java eclipsed it. I discovered C# i n 2002 after having struggled with Java. C# had the taste of Anders, and in many ways looked like Object Pascal with curly braces. I have done some typescript now, and its type system is great, but is javascript after all and is not my thing.

[BdR]

Back in the 80s, Turbo Pascal was quite impressive, it was so fast both compiling and running the actual code, but also intuitive and very well documented.

iirc some commercial msdos games were created using Turbo Pascal, like *Lemmings* and the official *Tetris* version.

[Tuxon]

I love Turbo Pascal. My favorite language.

[MrPetzold]

What a legend ! I've always liked his languages / products, all the way from Turbo Pascal.

[okimaniceguy]

Anders rocks ...I met him and his brother in the 70s and never knew both would be so successful in technology.

[fresky]

Great video, this is the first time I hear from Anders' natural language after using his programming languages for so many years😄

[DotnetareaBr]

I am very grateful to this person for all the things he created that are now part of my daily life.

[PKAnon]

I appreciate the tight editing on this. I feel it did not waste a moment of my time.
His head is a bit choppy at times but that's a fair tradeoff since this kind of content is primarily audio.

[andersondamasceno]

Very good interview! the background presentation was a great idea.

[stephenhosking]

Missed opportunity!

Near the end he talks about the promises of artificial intelligence and machine learning, including some futuristic ideas about AI and programming. He finishes with "keep on coding", and tells us that the languages and ideas which have been around for forty years have "a lot of staying power". Great! But, this was a golden opportunity to slip in that when our generation started programming forty years ago people were telling us we'd be "out of a job in ten years, because computers will be programming themselves". In 1986 I met a programmer who said that people had been telling him that since the 1960s. I wish he'd reminded us of that as the perfect close-off!

Great interview! Thanks Anders for co-operating so generously, and thankyou to Context Free for the intelligent questions and the continuous background information.

[zzord]

What a legend! I learned Turbo Pascal in high school, then started my career working on enterprise systems in Delphi, then switched to C#, (a little Java and Python in between), and today I'm a web dev using TypeScript.

[ranaictiu]

We developer community, so grateful to you for typescript...

[Gordonfreems]

Amazing interview, I always admire when these legends make things seem so simple when they explain ideas

[bobweiram]

Anders is GOAT! He's to programming what Seaborg is to nuclear physics. It's too bad Borland never released their Ada compiler.