Anders Hejlsberg created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript. He has worked at Microsoft for 30 years as a Technical Fellow. This episode of The Pragmatic Engineer is a direct conversation with one of the handful of people who have materially shaped how software gets written at scale.
The interview covers specific design decisions: C# was built by a small group of experienced language designers meeting a few hours per week. TypeScript succeeded because tooling was treated as a first-class concern alongside the language itself. Hejlsberg also traces the full arc from an HP 2100 with 32K of memory and a paper tape boot loader to the abstraction-heavy environments developers work in today, and explains why Turbo Pascal beat competitors by shipping more than a compiler.
The last section is where it gets forward-looking. Hejlsberg identifies which language features hold up under AI-assisted development and describes what changes when developers stop writing code line by line. If you build tools, design APIs, or care about what programming looks like in 10 years, the full transcript is worth your time.
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