Among all the books featured in the Library section of this magazine, there is one that has been mentioned particularly often, again and again. We are talking about the excellent “Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages” by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden, published by O’Reilly in 2009. It is high time that we dedicated a full entry to this gem, focusing on one of the interviews in particular: that of Anders Hejlsberg.

And why that interview in particular, you ask? Well, for some strange coincidence, the software development career of the author of the lines you are reading right now has moved following the rhythm of products created by the mind of Mr. Hejlsberg.

Among my first contacts with programming, I dived into Turbo Pascal for the first time around 1994, and then played extensively with Delphi around 1995 and 1996. Already working as a developer, in 1998 I used Visual J++ to write one of my first Java apps. Then I made a living as a C# developer from 2002 to 2008. Finally, during the 2010s I dived into various TypeScript projects, both for web frontends as for mobile applications alike.

And guess what: well, all of these programming languages stem from the same mind, that of Mr. Hejlsberg; first working at Borland, then as a Microsoft emeritus employee.

So it is no coincidence that among all the beautiful interviews gathered by Biancuzzi and Warden, the one with Mr. Hejlsberg grabs most of my attention. I do consider him, without hesitation, the greatest programming language designer of our era. Not only because the language themselves compile fast, yield readable and elegant syntaxes, and are approachable at many levels of expertise, but precisely because of the combination of the aforementioned factors.

Anders Hejlsberg has consistently placed developer experience at the center of his design process, and the final resulting languages have always been nothing short of amazing: easy to understand, fast to use, and of the highest possible quality.

In page 296 of Biancuzzi and Warden’s book, Hejlsberg exposes the pragmatism that has driven his lifetime work since the very beginning:

I’ve certainly always been in the more practical camp. I’m an engineer more than I’m a scientist, if you will. It’s my belief that if you teach people something, teach them something they can use later for something practical.

When asked about the “themes” guiding his work from Turbo Pascal to C#, he provides some interesting insight:

I try to always keep a finger on the pulse of the community and try to be there with the relevant new. Well, Turbo Pascal was the innovative development environment, and Delphi was the visual programming–RAD. C# and .NET has all been about managed execution environments, type safety, and so forth. You learn from all of the stuff that’s around you, be it in your ecosystem or competitive ecosystems.

In an interview published on .EXE Magazine in 1995 right after the release of Borland Delphi, he stated that

What it really boils down to is productivity–we wanted to design a tool that would make developers more productive, all the way from prototype to production code. Other products lure you with visual tools, but once you get halfway through your project, they let you down because of sluggish performance, lack of extensibility, or general stability problems. (…) Borland has over ten years of experience in building the world’s fastest compilers, and we’ve put that knowledge to good use in Delphi–it compiles at about 350,000 lines per minute on a 90 MHz Pentium.

Biancuzzi and Warden’s offers much more than Hejlsberg’s interview, though. Among others, you will find Bjarne Stroustrup talking about C++, Guido van Rossum about Python, Thomas Kurtz about BASIC, Brian Kernighan about AWK, Roberto Ierusalimschy about Lua, Don Chamberlin about SQL, Brad Cox about Objective-C, James Gosling about Java, Larry Wall about Perl, and Bertrand Meier about Eiffel.

Last but not least, Anders Hejlsberg is back on his turf as I publish these words: this time, rewriting the TypeScript compiler, but this time using the Go programming language. How about that. Quite the pragmatic approach, if you ask me, and no, I am not the least surprised that he chose Go for the task.

Cover photo by the author.