Life and Times of Anders Hejlsberg

Video: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=159952#159952

Anders won the Dr. Dobbs Journal Annual Award

Born: North of Copenhagen in Denmark - Danish

Narrator: At one point in his career he was more famous than Bill Gates. Pictures of him in sports cars.

What was his best Bill Gates meeting experience: Fairly recent in January or February - Showing Bill the Project Clarity and C# 3.0 and the database integration work. Had 30 minutes. Bill gates said it was the most exciting thing he'd seen during demo days.

Worst moment: Bill Gates is very opinionate. When Microsoft was making offers to hire Anders, he spoke with Bill Gates about staying at Borland, and refusing Microsofts initial offer. Bill Gates said "What's it going to take?" (Not mentioned in the video is the fact that the final signing bonus that Microsoft offered was $40,000,000, which was more than the revenue of the entire annual sales of the Borland languages division at that time. Borland was willing to match the initial $10 million offer, but not the $40 million offer.)

Anders is now a distinguished engineer. Chief Architect of the C# programming line. Participates in the DOT NET CLR and Base Class Libraries. Gets involved in a variety of initiatives, and on Avalon. Always something new.

What is the most exciting part of the job: Lots of fun with C# 3.0 right now. The next major rev of the C# programming line. Great design team.

What is the most frustrating part: Microsoft is a great place with lots of very smart people. You have to convince a lot of people of your great ideas.

Anders came to Microsoft in 1996. His previous successes were Turbo Pascal and Delphi.

Bob, senior vice president of Windows Server division.

• "Only a few people in the world are able to deeply able to contribute to the development of languages at a fundamental architectural level. Anders at the top of a very elite pyramid in how he continues the customer."
• "Turbo Pascal was incredible language for it's time, considerably ahead of it's time for the 1980's. He's brought that experience to C#. Our customers are the ones who benefit from that."

Got started at the high school he went to, one of the first high schools to make available a computer for students.

Anders dad was an engineer who worked for Motorola. His brother Thomas also got Anders started. Attended Danish Technical University, but didn't graduate.

Joined a little company, called Polydata. For the freshman at the university, you go on a camping trip with the seniors. Playing a german card game for money, and Anders oponent kept loosing money and had to write IOUs. 1979.

Wrote a compiler at Polydata. He taught himself how to write compiler on a kit based Z80 computer with 4MHZ cpu. It came with Microsoft's ROM Basic. He used that for a day, then moved to the more interesting stuff like machine stuff. He wanted to write an algol compiler, but his friend turned him onto this new thing called Pascal. So he wrote a subset of pascal, with an editor, and compiler, in 12K and sold it as a breadboard. This was the early ancestor of Turbo Pascal. It became fuller implementation for CPM, and fuller for Borland.

How did you meet the Borland employees. Borland was originally founded in Denmark a year before incorporating in the U.S.

Molecular computer was into hardware, but wanted to get into software.. They'd written a couple of pieces of software, and wanted to get into that. They wrote some products in Digital Research MT+ Pascal compiler. They came back after trying out Turbo Pascal, and wanted to make a deal with Anders. They made a royalty deal with Borland to rebrand the Turbo Pascal compiler.

Anders moved to US in 1987.

During his years at Borland, Anders had two hit products Turbo Pascal and Delphi. He was at Borland from 1983 to 1996. Wasn't formally an employee in the beginning. Those years at Borland were the seminal work to learn to be a compiler architect.

Gary Wizzen, Anders manager at Borland International, made a guest appearance.

Gary was development manager at Borland from '84 - '98. His number one job at Borland was Anders handling.

Gary asked what was it like to deal with the Turbo Pascal: What was it like to meet Anders? - Lars had already come from Denmark to work in the U.S., and he showed up looking like James Dean. As for Anders, Gary says "We were looking for an Albert Einstein, and we got Dooggie Houser"

Pascal on it's face was a simple product not needing 72 manuals.

The inexpensiveness was not Anders insight, he thought Borland was nuts to sell it for $50.

Was Anders a primadonna? Gary says there were special rules for Anders. He worked at home 4 days a week, and came in for 3 days a week for a total of 7. The thing about primadonnas is you can build a whole company around them. Turbo Pascal funded the early days of Borland.

What was it like to move to the U.S. to work for Borland: Anders worked with Mogens and Lars.... Gary said they lost the source code, but continued to use it for years.

Anders was in Denmark, where he would write code, and fed ex floppy disks. Back then it was very much a one man show. He had to learn to be a team player.

Borland Delphi was a blockbuster big hit. The industry was moving from text based to graphic UIs.

Visual Basic came out first, and was very cool, and it was what they wanted to do. Instead they worked on a pure visual project called Monet. A visual designer. It all sounded great, but no one thought about whether it scaled.

"When it comes to visual programming, a line of code is worth a thousand words. You die a slow death of a thousand lines going from here to there." - Anders

The big buzzword was client server, Zach Urlacher was key in making this an enterprise product appealing to the client server market.

Is it true Anders was asked by Gary to delay his wedding to ship the product? Yes. And he said no. I think he said maybe, and the wife said no. It was one of the few times he was aghast.

You are down there in Scotts Valley competing with VB. What was it like to work with Microsoft as a competitor? Gary says, There are people doing the marketing side, meeting their counterparts, then there is the people building the stuff. And we felt we were solving the real problems better than anyone else, and we loved competing against VB. We felt we were making something people could use.

Anders agrees that bringing a real compiler, a real object oriented language, these were a good cause.

Java

Within 2 weeks of Anders joining, Visual J++ 1.0 shipped. Lots of stuff needed to be done there to deal project system to tune it for Java, add a visual designer, etc.

Visual J++ 6.0 was the next product.

Anders may have been naive in this, and didn't realize there would be a battle of the giants going on, and lawsuits. He liked the byte codes and such. AWT is terrible. "We got our fingers caught in the machinery." - Anders

People were fixated on claiming Microsoft was trying to coopt Java.

Sun sued for breach of contract, copyright infringement, etc.

The experience gave them clarity around creating DOT NET, instead of trying to shape a competitors platform.

Learning experience from Java is that "you have to be very sure what you want to do with a product, and what is the value proposition to customers and yourself... You have to be in control of your own destiny."

Other videos with Anders Hejlsberg, (sometimes spelled Anders Heijlsberg)

• http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=10502 - What influenced C#?