Anders Hejlsberg - Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum

The Discussion

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  hmm he pronounces it del-thigh, i always thought it was del-fee.  what about everyone else.

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  It's actually, del-fi (long i). Delphi is a city of Phocis in mainland Greece

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  Ah, the fond memories of Turbo Pascal and college Data Structures classes.  This also reminded me of the geek wars I'd be part of in high school where we had the Trash-80 camp waring against the Atari camp.  Days to be missed...

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  I got the chance to tell Anders this at the PDC which was cool.  In '85 a couple of my buddies and I worked in a PC lab on campus. In our Pascal course, we managed to convince the teacher to let us do our projects on PCs using Turbo Pascal.  The rest of the class used the campus mainframe (Cyber something or other) with a crappy line editor and I'm not even sure what they used for a debugger (printf equiv?). Anyway, we smoked the rest of the class.  The teacher was quite impressed with how quickly we finished our projects and the quality of the code.

• 

  The ancient pronunciation is: Delphoi
  
  Delphi (Delfee) is new greek.
  
  
  btw, it's a beautiful place:
  
  http://www.culture.gr/2/21/211/21110a/e211ja01.html
  
  
  I was there in 1998.
  
  Kazi

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  This is fun: this is a repeat of a long-running debate we had back in '95 when Delphi shipped and I was on TeamB.
  
  Delphi is a town of ancient Greece for which the correct pronunciation (according to Greeks) has a short "-ee" sound at the end, like "taxi". In the UK and the rest of Europe (as far as I know), we also pronounce it this way.
  
  In the US, the predominant pronunciation ends in "eye". Anders pronounces it this way as well, but I think that's just because he's living there and has adopted American English.
  
  So all of you who insist on calling it "Delph-eye", just remember when you're next looking for a cab to call out "Tax-eye! Tax-eye!" :o)
  
  --Mike Scott
  

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  This beats a video with a Bill Gates any day. Anders Hejlsberg is one of those tech icons I'd like to hear more from. I respect them more than any rock star CEO.
  
  /Lars.
  

• 

  Yes, Anders Hejlsberg has made a great contribution.  C# rocks (way better than java) !!!
  
  
  Here are three videos from MS with Anders Hejlsberg
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/Seminar/en/20020213AHKeyNote/manifest.xml&rate=2
  
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/Episode035/default.asp
  
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/Episode008/default.asp
  
  
  Mike

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  More Anders videos coming all week long. Stay tuned...

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  WinInsider wrote:

  Yes, Anders Hejlsberg has made a great contribution.  C# rocks (way better than java) !!!
  
  
  Here are three videos from MS with Anders Hejlsberg
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/seminar/shared/asp/view.asp?url=/Seminar/en/20020213AHKeyNote/manifest.xml&rate=2
  
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/Episode035/default.asp
  
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/Episode008/default.asp
  
  
  Mike

  
  thx for these videos, it was very interesting.
  

• 

  C# goes back to “98!  Anders is much more animated in this video then he is when speaking to a room full of people.

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  I found one more video just posted on MSDN with Anders Hejlsberg.
  
  Anders talks about Nullable types, With keyword, ValueType boxing and unboxing, and default method parameters.
  
  UPDATED: MS has removed the video, but I still managed to trackdown the video download.

• 

  Anders is a cool guy.  Very unassuming.  Years ago I was at the Borland developer conference, and we had an application written in Turbo Pascal that exceeded the ability of the compiler -- it was too large.  I should add that despite the fact that this program was written for DOS, it's still in use at the well known corporation for which it was written.
  
  At any rate, we went to a session Anders was giving and after the session we cornered him and told him about the problem.  This was in the days that support for extended memory was just coming out. Anders said: hold on a minute.  He left and came back with a disk that had an alpha version of the TP compiler with support for extended memory.  We took it back with us, and compiled the program the first day we were back.
  
  That started a long relationship with Borland -- a company I have to say I really loved, and was sad to see go out the way it did.  Once win3.1 started to become popular, I turned my attention to windows development.  Our applications did a lot of stuff with databases, and we were using 4GL's like powerbuilder and gupta sql windows.  VB wasn't out yet, or maybe was just coming out.  Being hardcore TP bigots, we started talking to the Borland folks about what we wanted -- something that combined the best of TP, with the 5.5 Oop, owl, all its great tools, debugger, profiler, and what we had found was the best features in the 4GL's we were using.  Eventually we got invited to beta a new product they were developing that was built to address a lot of our wish list.  As it turned out, that  product was Delphi.  Unfortunately, it just took them too long to get it to market.  It was sad to see VB rise to the top, when Delphi was so much better thought out, and based on a decent language.