A Danish engineer dropped out of university in 1979, wrote a Pascal compiler so fast it made Borland a hundred-million-dollar company, then built the language that became the backbone of Microsoft's entire software ecosystem, then built TypeScript, which became the number one language on GitHub in 2025 and most developers who use his work every day have never heard his name.
His name is Anders Hejlsberg.
He was born in Copenhagen in 1960, started studying engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in 1979, and left before finishing his degree because he was already building something more interesting than anything his courses could offer.
He had access to a minicomputer at his high school, one of the first in Denmark to have one. He taught himself machine code, Algol, and Pascal.
By the time he was supposed to be finishing his degree, he had already written a Pascal compiler from scratch for the Nascom-2 microcomputer. He released it under the name Blue Label Pascal.
A small Danish software company called PolyData picked it up. Borland, the American developer tools company, found it and saw immediately what they had. They licensed the compiler, brought Hejlsberg to California, and in November 1983 released it as Turbo Pascal.
The price was $49.95. At the time, most Pascal compilers cost hundreds of dollars and ran slowly. Turbo Pascal was cheap and compiled code so fast that developers could not believe it was real. One reviewer read the speed claims on the box, assumed they were marketing fiction, tested it, and then wrote that he had never seen anything like it.
The product sold over one million copies. Borland became a serious company almost overnight, and Hejlsberg was the reason.
He kept building. He became chief architect of Delphi in 1995, Borland's rapid application development environment built on Object Pascal. Delphi let Windows developers build full graphical applications faster than anything else available.
It dominated enterprise Windows development through the mid-1990s. Teams that used it could ship in weeks what their competitors took months to build.
Microsoft noticed. In 1996 they made him an offer. He left Borland and joined Microsoft, and the project they handed him was the one that would define the next decade of enterprise software.
He designed C#.
Released in 2000 alongside the .NET Framework, C# was built to be modern in ways Java was not. Clean object orientation. Garbage collection. Strong typing.
A syntax familiar enough that Java and C++ developers could pick it up quickly but designed without the legacy decisions those languages had accumulated over decades. Hejlsberg later said one of his goals was to make the language feel inevitable, as if every decision was the only sensible one.
It worked. C# became the primary language of Microsoft's entire development platform. It powers enterprise applications, game development through Unity, cloud services on Azure, and Windows applications across hundreds of millions of machines. Around 6.2 million developers write C# professionally today.
Then he did it again.
By 2010, JavaScript had become unavoidable. Every web application ran on it. But JavaScript had been designed in ten days in 1995 for simple browser scripting, not for building complex systems with large teams. As codebases grew to hundreds of thousands of lines, the lack of a type system meant bugs that a compiler would have caught in any other language were only discovered in production.
Hejlsberg saw the problem clearly and spent two years designing a solution.
TypeScript launched in 2012 as an open-source typed superset of JavaScript. You write TypeScript, and it compiles down to plain JavaScript. The type system catches errors before the code runs. Large teams can work on the same codebase without breaking each other's code. Every major JavaScript framework adopted it. Google, Airbnb, Slack, and Microsoft all moved their codebases to TypeScript.
In August 2025, TypeScript overtook Python and JavaScript to become the number one language on GitHub by monthly contributors.
He is 65 years old. He is still at Microsoft as a Technical Fellow. He is still working on TypeScript.
Four languages. Four decades. Turbo Pascal made developer tools affordable and fast. Delphi made Windows application development accessible. C# became the backbone of enterprise software. TypeScript became the dominant language of the modern web.
Most of the developers using his work right now are too young to know what Turbo Pascal was. They learned to code in languages that borrowed from C#. They write TypeScript every day without knowing who designed it.
He dropped out of university in 1979 to build a compiler.
He has not stopped since.
@cubalondra Interesante, esto le da más credibilidad, los bandos se demarcan cada vez más claro y muestran quienes estaban alineados durante esa operación.
Introducing GLM-5.2: Frontier Intelligence, Open Weights
- Significant improvements in coding and agentic tasks
- Strong long-horizon capabilities with a 1M context window
- Two levels of reasoning effort: GLM-5.2 (max) pushes the limits, while GLM-5.2 (high) strikes a strong balance between performance and token efficiency
- MIT-licensed open weights
- Same API pricing as GLM-5.1
Tech Blog: https://t.co/LAsxUdN0JZ
Weights: https://t.co/g0A1C4UWx4
API: https://t.co/Kc3E22cbN7
Coding Plan: https://t.co/Nk8Y98HNhU
Chat: https://t.co/WCqWT0qCQb
scoop: Microsoft has restricted employees from using Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5 model in GitHub Copilot, because of data retention concerns. Microsoft’s legal teams are evaluating Anthropic’s new data retention changes. Full details 👇https://t.co/D3YofUD5hp
In memory of the great Ayrton Senna - the undisputed Master of Monaco! (1987, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993).
Fairmont Hotel.
@FairmontMC#Senna 🇧🇷
#MonacoGP 🇲🇨
@DiegoArcos14 Pista muy compleja para el piloto, solo los mejores la dominan, incluso en los videojuegos se siente su dificultad mucho mayor que otros circuitos.
Nemotron 3 Ultra is live on OpenRouter and it's free right now.
NVIDIA's first open frontier model built for agents.
The specs:
550B params / 55B active MoE
1M context window
300+ tok/s
It's open weights, which sounds like you can run it locally.
You can't, realistically. 550B parameters needs serious datacenter GPUs, not a desktop.
So the real story is the free hosted tier.
Frontier class reasoning at $0 in and $0 out, while it lasts.
For anyone building agents, that's the unlock.
Test it before the free window closes.
Dropping it into Hermes today.
Will report back with real numbers.
[NASA almost lost a $280M Mars mission coz of a bug every dev studies about in college.]
The 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission had a computer glitch on the Sojourner rover which triggered repeated total system reboots.
It was a Priority Inversion bug.
A low-priority task held a mutex, but a high-priority task needed it and a medium-priority task kept preempting the low-priority task.
This led the watchdog timer (failsafe) to reboot the system wiping all data again & again.