Anders Hejlsberg created Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript. He is a 30-year Microsoft Technical Fellow and one of the most consequential programming language designers alive. This episode of The Pragmatic Engineer traces his full career: from booting an HP 2100 with 32K of memory and a paper tape loader, to shipping languages used by hundreds of millions of developers.
The conversation covers specific design decisions that determined whether languages survived. C# was built by a small group of experienced designers meeting a few hours per week. TypeScript's success depended as much on tooling as on the language itself. Turbo Pascal won not because it was a better compiler but because it shipped as a complete, integrated environment. These are not abstract lessons. Hejlsberg explains the exact tradeoffs, and 14 timestamped takeaways are included in the original.
The episode also presses Hejlsberg on AI-assisted development: which language features hold up when developers stop writing code line by line, and what actually changes in software engineering craft when agents introduce bugs faster than humans can review them. If you work in any language he touched, read the full transcript.
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