Aside from Bill Gates, Anders Hejlsberg is my favorite geek.

In the mid-80s, my black-and-white TV had the phrase, “UNDER LICENSE FROM MICROSOFT” burned into the screen. It looked like the image to the right here (only in B&W).

But, once I grew out of my TRS-80 MC-10 and my TRS-80 Color Computer, BASIC was no longer a viable language to be coding in. I was in the PC world now with my AT&T 6300 on loan from my employer. And to code on that, I needed Turbo Pascal.

I loved Pascal. It was how I thought about software. And, Borland’s books taught me how to code in it and how to think about software. Later, Borland came out with Object Pascal, and Anders taught me object-oriented programming. And, along with Charles Petzold, I learned event-driven programming in Windows 3.1. Petzold and CompuServe was Stackoverflow and Google all rolled into one.

And then Anders created Delphi and combined windows and Pascal into one GUI that produced tiny, fast .exe’s that blew away Visual Basic in so many ways. Delphi was wonderfully easy to program in.

Well, Bill Gates was having none of that. So, he swooped into Borland and stole Anders from Philippe Kahn—killing Delphi. Then, Gates let Anders work his magic at Microsoft. And, when VB.NET and C# came out with the new Visual Studio and the .NET libraries, I felt the same feeling as I had felt when I experienced Delphi.

This was right. This was the way it’s supposed to be. Anders hasn’t let us down.

And now . . . he’s working on TypeScript . . . listen to “the man” talk about it . . . and download it if you like it . . . from my favorite geek, Anders . . . he’s making JavaScript better these days . . . too . . . cool . . .