The creators of 4 languages at the top of technology — Anders Hejlsberg

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Historically, there have been thousands of programming languages, but only dozens of them have been popular so far; in the software industry, language developers are even rarer; as the father of a language, he has been worshipped like a god; and among the gods, he , spanning 40 years, has created four achievements in the field of programming languages: Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript; he has a place among the 22 Technical Fellows who symbolize the top of technology in Microsoft. He is Anders Hejlsberg.

Borland like a gangster - Turbo Pascal and Delphi

The early Anders had been seen as a superhero in the IT world. Born in Copenhagen in 1960, he created two popular works, Turbo Pascal and Delphi, from his entry into electrical engineering at the Danish University of Technology (DTU) to the age of 36. Delphi, the successor of Turbo Pascal, is still the top 20 programming language.

Since his freshman year, Anders has written the blue-label Pascal compiler for the Nascom-2, a Z80 CPU-based single-board computer kit, to replace Microsoft's Basic language on the CPU. It is said that the development of this Pascal compiler was largely inspired by the "Tiny Pascal" compiler in the book "Algorithms and Data Structures" by Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, a Turing Award winner.

Soon after, Anders rewrote Pascal for the microcomputer operating systems CP/M and DOS, and marketed it under the PolyPascal brand. In 1983, he licensed PolyPascal to Borland Company, and was integrated into an IDE by Borland, renamed Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal brought Borland to fame and laid the foundation for Borland to become a world-renowned software company.

From licensing PolyPascal to Borland, to leaving in 1996, in Borland's 13 years as chief engineer, and founder of Turbo Pascal and Delphi, Anders delivered a total of 7 Turbo Pascal versions, and 3 Delphi versions. Anders' influence on Borland still exists in the memory of old programmers in the 1990s. They often miss Borland's high-spirited and chivalrous Borland in that period and the development tools full of aura.

At the height of Borland's glory, it also became Microsoft's competitor in programming language compilers and programming development tools. In response to Microsoft's strong position in PCs, Borland, known as one of the three major computer companies in the 1990s, also publicly criticized Microsoft together with Sun and Lotus.

However, Borland, which competed with Microsoft, suffered operating losses in 1994, had to sell assets to bail out, and there were rumors of large layoffs.

A New Journey - Join Microsoft

Borland's decline gave Microsoft an opportunity to recruit. Since the end of 1995, employees have left Borland to join Microsoft, including Anders who joined Microsoft in October 1996.

Borland, both internally and externally troubled, sued Microsoft in May 1997, claiming that over a period of 30 months, Microsoft had poached 34 key Borland employees with millions of dollars in signing bonuses and other incentives. The lawsuit sparked strong public opinion, and the media reported headlines such as "unfair competition," "brain drain," and "snatching talent." Various plots of Microsoft poaching are also vividly circulated in the society.

So, why did Microsoft risk the negative comments from the outside world to sign experts like Anders? Anders' addition, what role did it play for Microsoft to get rid of the hold of the computer giant Sun?

In the mid-1990s, Sun developed the epoch-making programming language Java. Java has become very popular due to its ability to "write once run anywhere". The Netscape browser, which had occupied 90% of the market at the time, decided to cooperate with Sun to run Java applets directly in the browser, and even considered directly embedding Java as a scripting language in web pages.

As a browser competitor, Microsoft can't be left behind either. As a result, Microsoft obtained Sun's authorization for Java, announcing that Java applets would also run in IE3. To support running Java on Windows, Microsoft needs experienced developers and experts, and Borland is the home of that talent.

Programmers' darling - C

Joining Microsoft's Anders, he first presided over the development of Visual J++, and also played an important role in the development of Microsoft's first cross-platform application development framework. NET. However, when Sun sued Microsoft in October 1997 for IE4's violation of the Java licensing terms, it was Anders who helped Microsoft get rid of Sun's restrictions. Bob Moglia, then the vice president of Microsoft's server division and later CEO of Snowflake, later recalled, "In the world, only a very small number of people have the ability to develop languages and development environments. In this regard, Anders is the top of the pyramid. The man. He created C# with the talent that created Turbo Pascal and Delphi.

As for why Anders left Borland to join Microsoft? The stories that circulate have nothing to do with material things. During his time at Borland, Anders has made significant licensing revenue from the sale of Turbo Pascal and Delphi. In several interviews, Anders also said that he joined Microsoft because, 13 years later, I needed to try something different.

C#, developed at the end of 1998, is Microsoft's new move to get rid of Sun's control. Just days after C# 1.0 was released, James Gosling, the founder of Java and then a vice president at Sun, said, "These days, although Microsoft, the software giant, is doing its best to use a language similar to Java to curb Java's influence, But I'm not going to lose sleep over Microsoft." Still, Gosling admits that he and the rest of the company panicked when they first heard about the new language, C#.

As chief architect of C#, Anders led the development of C#. C# is an object-oriented high-level programming language based on the .NET framework. While inheriting the powerful features of C and C++, C# has stripped some of their complex features, making it an efficient and powerful programming language in the C language family. Based on the .NET framework class library, C# has the rapid development capabilities similar to Visual Basic.

C# is favored by millions for its versatility and easy-to-read syntax, making it the first choice for web and mobile applications, game development, business applications, and more. Twenty years after its release, C# has consistently ranked among the top ten most popular languages as one of the most widely used programming languages. At the end of 2021, the CEO of Tiobe, an authoritative publishing agency for language rankings, said that C# is most likely to be elected this year's "Language of the Year" because the once darling of C# will gain new popularity in 2021.

C#'s popularity is also largely due to its tendency to quickly embrace new features. In each version of programming language evolution, Anders added many development-friendly killer features to C# with his own experience and technology, for example, language-integrated query LINQ released in 3.0; optional parameters released in 4.0; Read-only automatic properties, expression body functions, Null conditional operators released in 6.0; and Switch expressions, Null coalescing assignments, etc. released in 8.0. As the current C# Lead Designer, Mads Torgersen said, it is this forward-looking design that has allowed C# to accumulate such a large user base over a 20-year period.

The foundation and forward-looking established by C# also enabled Microsoft to create Blazor, a cutting-edge project. After three years of development, on May 19, 2020, at the annual technology conference Build, Microsoft officially released Blazor for "Build client web apps with C#". With WebAssembly technology, and with Blazor, it is now possible to build interactive web UIs in C# instead of JavaScript. Makes C# a language that can be executed both on the server and in the browser.

In 2001, Anders received the prestigious Dr. Dobb Award for Outstanding Programming for his contributions to the development of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

In 2007, Anders and his team received the Microsoft Technology Recognition Award. In the same year, he became one of Microsoft's 22 super brains, the top technical title Technical Fellow.

52 years old and put on the battle again - Typescript

In 2012, 10 years after C# 1.0 was released, Anders was 52 years old. At this time, the technical world is still full of attention and expectations for him. ZDNet published two articles in a row, "What will be the next big move of the father of Microsoft C#? ", "Can the father of C# save us from the bondage of Javascript?" ", the big move speculated in the article is the TypeScript 0.8 version that will be released for the first time in October 2012.

What impact will Anders bring to developers and Microsoft this time?

In late 2010, Anders started developing TypeScript. At the time, the Web world was undergoing a series of perfect storms: from the Windows-dominated all-in-one desktop, to the emergence of a variety of hardware and operating systems that made cross-platform a necessity; at the same time, Google's V8 engine made Javascript More than 10x improvement was obtained. And with HTML5 coming into place, writing applications in the browser is not only necessary but possible.

However, just when the developers were ready to show their talents, they were limited by some flaws in JavaScript. Since JavaScript has no classes, no modules, and in particular no type system, this limits the development of large applications. Because browsers only support JavaScript, and there is no substitute for JavaScript, how to solve this problem became a difficult problem at the time.

Before TypeScript came along, Microsoft intended to solve this problem with a tool called Script#. When asked about Anders, he had a different opinion. He believes that JavaScript best practices cannot be experienced by using another language. Instead, it should be based on JavaScript to solve its own shortcomings. The key to the solution is to add a type system to JavaScript without compromising its uniquely flexible, simple, and dynamic nature.

TypeScript is designed for developing large-scale applications, and TypeScript can be transpiled to JavaScript. Since TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, any existing JavaScript program is a valid TypeScript program. After two years of internal development, Microsoft first released TypeScript 0.8 in October 2012.

Today, TypeScript is a very common programming language for building large-scale applications in the browser. Since its release, it has become more and more popular among developers. TypeScript ranks third in Stack Overflow's 2021 survey. and is still on the rise.
The success of TypeScript can also be confirmed from another perspective. At the same time as TypeScript was developed, Facebook also proposed Flow as a solution. However, today, the trend of the two is quite different. TypeScript's star on GitHub has risen to more than 60,000 year by year, while Flow is still hovering at 20,000; in addition, the number of daily downloads in the past year is also very different. Flow is basically at the level of hundreds of thousands per day, while TypeScript is between 20-30 million.

Solving the challenges of developing large-scale JavaScript applications is not the ultimate mission of TypeScript, but it has helped Microsoft overcome its fear of open source.

Believe in open source - leverage the Javascript community

As we all know, Microsoft is now the biggest player in open source. However, Microsoft's fear of open source also has a well-known history. When TypeScript was developed, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the open-source operating system Linux a "malignant tumor" in 2001 because Linux was attached to everything related to intellectual property. Fifteen years later, Ballmer announced his love for open source and Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, but Microsoft executives were still terrified of open source when TypeScript began to develop.

Anders believes in open source, and has a unique open source belief and philosophy, which is why TypeScript has been open source from day 0 of development. Anders believes that putting the code in a public place for people to copy and occasionally handle some Issues is only technically open source, and does not reflect the essence of "open development" as open source. Open development means that you have to make the whole process of development public.

At the same time, open development is also necessary for TypeScript. Anders said that the initial build of TypeScript was just an idea, some prototypes, and there was a great need for feedback from the JavaScript community to improve JavaScript practices. And the only way to attract the JavaScript community is to open source.

In 2014, TypeScript migrated the code to GitHub, realizing a thorough "open development". For TypeScript teams, GitHub is their workplace. There, they are so close to the user, the user can see the code written by the team instantly, there is no information distortion between them, and the communication with the user is faster.

However, when Anders proposed the open source initiative of TypeScript, Microsoft executives were not very reluctant, and Andrers and the team did a lot of persuasion work. At the same time, with the entry of Azure into Microsoft's industrial chain, Microsoft also softened its attitude towards open source after 2012. Therefore, TypeScript helped Microsoft overcome the fear of open source within Microsoft, and promoted Microsoft's open source culture, which has become a consensus in the industry.

Not long ago, I interviewed Anders' technology media TheNewStack, using the old record company Motown as an analogy to today's Microsoft. If there were legendary singers such as Stevie, Smokey, Marvin and Michael Jackson in Motown Records in its heyday, then behind the renaissance of Microsoft under CEO Nadella, there is also a master of hit works, his name is Anders Hejlsberg .

Anders is admirable, not only because of the continuous breakthrough on the same theme in the span of 40 years; also because, although he is sixty years old, he is still indulging in the front line of research and development, which brings warmth and inspiration to countless people. and inspired. In today's industry of rapid iteration of knowledge and products, whether practitioners should stop to think, the experience and insights accumulated over time, like many experiences and wisdom in the long history, will surely cross the boundaries of age and bring value.

In 2019, four language masters aged 55-60 gathered for a CS4All fundraiser. The languages they created still top the list to this day, and they themselves remain active representatives and practitioners. As their peers, looking at their current high-brain learning activities, they can't help but look up at the mountains, and their hearts are filled with admiration.