What Anders Hejlsberg Revealed About TypeScript’s Future and Design Philosophy

Anders Hejlsberg, born in 1960 in Denmark, created Turbo Pascal and Delphi at Borland before joining Microsoft, where he led the development of Visual J++, the .NET platform, and the C# language. He now serves as chief architect of C# and a core developer of TypeScript.

Impressions of Anders

Now 55, Anders remains passionate after more than 30 years in software, spending much of his day still coding. Colleagues describe him as approachable, humorous, and a true programmer‑first leader. His impression can be summed up in three points: lifelong coding, open‑source advocacy, and language mastery.

1. Lifelong Coding

Anders still writes a large amount of code daily and intends to continue. He acknowledges his strength lies in programming rather than management, despite having many senior positions available at Microsoft.

He attributes his success to the 10,000‑hour rule and genuine interest, emphasizing that passion outweighs salary when choosing work.

2. Open‑Source Advocate

He actively contributes to open‑source projects, submitting code to GitHub multiple times a day. Since Satya Nadella became CEO, Microsoft has embraced open source, with Anders playing a key role.

He helped open‑source the .NET Core runtime and now leads TypeScript, a community‑driven project where Microsoft does not dictate direction.

• New development projects prioritize open source • Establish the .NET Foundation to manage open‑source projects • Open‑source + open development, using and relying on GitHub • Cross‑platform tools, exemplified by Visual Studio Code

Anders believes open source is the future of software development; non‑open‑source solutions may lose developer interest.

3. Language Master

With deep expertise in language design, tooling, and compilers, Anders created C#, widely praised for its design. He shared several language design principles:

• Minimalism: add features only when necessary; a good feature is the minimal required set. • Design for longevity: aim for languages that remain useful across eras, independent of trends. • Challenges are rewarding: despite JavaScript’s flaws, its ubiquity makes improving it a worthwhile challenge.

TypeScript: A Key Piece of the JavaScript Ecosystem

TypeScript 1.6 has been released and is gaining traction, with developers migrating from CoffeeScript and preferring it over Facebook’s Flow. Its two major features are an optional static type system and seamless support for future ECMAScript versions.

The static type system moves many checks from runtime to compile time, enabling early detection of bugs. TypeScript also compiles modern ES6/ES7 syntax down to ES3/ES5, similar to Babel, but adds a type system that Babel lacks.

Anders emphasizes that TypeScript does not aim to replace JavaScript or run directly in browsers; it focuses on the development and compilation phase, improving productivity and enabling large‑scale collaborative applications.

Major adopters include Google’s Angular 2 framework and the Egret HTML5 game engine, demonstrating TypeScript’s suitability for production environments.

With a visionary leader like Anders, TypeScript’s future looks promising.