Anders Hejlsberg

Anders Hejlsberg, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, is interviewed in the Microsoft Channel 9 "Behind the Code" series.  Anders is one of the greatest minds in the programming field and has had a huge influence on programmers for more than 20 years.  Anders developed the first Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Turbo Pascal at Borland, and later developed Delphi, Visual Java, the Windows Foundation Classes, C# and the .Net framework. 

I had the pleasure of working with Anders on various versions of Turbo Pascal and Delphi back at Borland some years back.  One of the best things about Anders was he understood how to meet the needs of a very large audience of customers by applying principals of simplicity and elegance.  He was careful not to add features that would contribute complexity or feature bloat. 

Anders remains one of the sharpest developers in the industry and is currently focused on solving the impedence mismatch between programming languages and relational databases with a technology known as LINQ (Language Integrated Query).  LINQ makes queries into "first class citizens" in the .Net languages C# and VB. 

You can hear Anders describe some of his views on programming languages, life at Borland, work on Delphi, code reviews with Bill Gates, good taste in programming and his obsessively high quality standards.  There's also a section featuring Gary Whizin, who was Anders' manager (and ping-pong coach) for 13 years at Borland.   

• Channel 9: Behind the Code (video)
• MSDN: The C# Design Process
• Wikipedia: Anders Hejlsberg (includes links to articles)
• Blog: Embarassing Photo of Anders as Austin Powers