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What Anders Hejlsberg thinks about design

@anders-hejlsberg · 26 positions · 0 changes of mind

Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.

Anders Hejlsberg did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

8 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Anders Hejlsberg has said — not written or endorsed by them.

8 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingA language should be designed by a small group of people rather than by one person.

    Their wordsI think early on we decided that we want to have a team of people design this language, not just one.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 5th of 26 in this recording

    Interesting

  3. Our readingLanguage design is ninety per cent the same work every time and ten per cent new, which is why the experience carries from one language to the next.

    Their wordsAnd quite honestly, language design is 90% the same and 10% new for for pretty much every language. Every language you build still has to have a compiler. Compiler is still built in a pretty much the same way.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 6th of 26 in this recording

    compilers

    Interesting

  5. Our readingThe job of a design group is to try to shoot down every new idea; the ones that survive the attempt are probably the good ones.

    Their wordsAnd everyone was cognizant of okay, if someone comes up with a new idea, now it's our job to try to shoot it down. What What's wrong with this idea? Do Do you know what I mean? And if it could go if it could stand the the test of of that, then it was probably a decent idea.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 7th of 26 in this recording

    Interesting

  7. Our readingYou cannot build good tooling without a type system — decent tooling perhaps, but nothing that scales to a large team.

    Their wordswe knew from experience that you cannot build good tooling without a type system. You can build decent tooling, but it's never going to scale. It's never going to scale to large teams cuz you can't describe your intents in in the code.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 12th of 26 in this recording

    Interesting

  9. Our readingPeople adopted TypeScript for the tooling, not the types: an erasable type system is worth having because of the productivity the tooling built on it delivers.

    Their wordsAnd the reason they came, I think, is absolutely because of the the better tooling. And I think we were totally right there that like adding a an erasable type system and then using that to enable great tooling is really where the pro where the programmer productivity boost is realized.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 15th of 26 in this recording

    TypeScript

    Interesting

  11. Our readingA compiler that also serves an IDE has to be lazy and deferred throughout — a different way of building compilers from the one the textbooks teach.

    Their wordsAnd so everything is lazy and deferred and functional and reusable inside the compiler. And it's a very different way of writing compilers than than what the textbooks will traditionally teach you.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 16th of 26 in this recording

    compilers

    Interesting

  13. Our readingThe language best suited to AI is simply the one the models have seen most of in training, which is why they do so well on JavaScript, TypeScript and Python.

    Their wordsthat the language that's most suited for AI is the language that AI has seen the most of in its training set, right? And that's why you could argue AI does really well on JavaScript and TypeScript and Python because it's seen an awful lot of it

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 19th of 26 in this recording

    TypeScriptJavaScriptPython

    Interesting

  15. Our readingProgrammers are turning into project managers of an army of junior agents, and the craft is moving from writing code to reviewing it and holding the architecture.

    Their wordsIn a sense, we're all turning into project managers, right? And and we can have an army of junior programmers called agents that will just spit out reams of code, but someone's got to have the big picture and review all of that. And so, increasingly our craft is going from one of writing the code to one of of reviewing the code and and building the architecture of the code and overseeing the work, if if you will.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 24th of 26 in this recording

    AI and jobsmanagement

    Interesting