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Masterminds of Programming
book

Masterminds of Programming

by Federico Biancuzzi, Chromatic
March 2009
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
18h 40m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Masterminds of Programming

Chapter 13. C#

Language and Design

You’ve created and maintained several languages. You started as an implementer of Turbo Pascal; is there a natural progression from implementor to designer?

Anders Hejlsberg: I think it’s a very natural progression. The first compiler I wrote was for a subset of Pascal, and then Turbo Pascal was the first almost full implementation of Pascal. But Pascal was always meant as a teaching language and lacked a bunch of pretty common features that are necessary to write real word apps. In order to be commercially viable, we immediately had to dabble in extending in a variety of ways.

It’s surprising that a teaching language would be so successful in bridging the gap between teaching and commercial success.

Anders: There are many different teaching languages. If you look at Niklaus Wirth’s history—Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal, later Modula and Oberon—he always valued simplicity. Teaching languages can be teaching ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596801670Errata Page