korrents

What Anders Hejlsberg thinks about open source

@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.

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

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

  1. Our readingA proprietary language licensed from Microsoft had zero chance in the JavaScript ecosystem: TypeScript had to be open source or nobody would come.

    Their wordsAnd we we full well knew that there was absolutely zero chance that we would appeal to the JavaScript ecosystem with a proprietary programming language licensed from Microsoft. No. No one was going to come. It had to be open source. There was just no two ways about it, right?

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 13th of 26 in this recording

    TypeScriptJavaScriptMicrosoft

    Interesting

  3. Our readingPublishing the source is not the same as developing in the open, and only the second changes how the work actually goes.

    Their wordsYou know, there's open source and there's open development. And and and we were technically open source in the beginning, but it was not open development. We would sort of lob the source code out in this repository and scrape the issues off of that and put it into our internal issue tracker.

    ↗TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsbergyoutube.com 14th of 26 in this recording

    Interesting