Anders Hejlsberg Quotes

At Microsoft, the magic of software is used to take on very interesting challenges.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.

If every sector of business and society will be driven by software - how does that get enabled? By highly-paid computer scientists funded by risk capital in Silicon Valley? Or by lots of engineers who can build it themselves?

Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

I became convinced that the whole essence of the computer revolution is interactivity. That was very early in my career. At the time I did that it was heresy.

If you know how to make software, then you can create big things.

I think the combination of graduate education in a field like Computer Science and the opportunity to apply this in a work environment like Microsoft is what drove me. The impact these opportunities create can lead to work that has broad, worldwide impact.

What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people - ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.

The computer offers another kind of creativity. You cannot ignore the creativity that computer technology can bring. But you need to be able to move between those two different worlds.

Whatever can be done in this world will be done. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you.

One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

We're the toolmakers. Our developers are the real creative geniuses.

Old companies that had nothing to do with software in the past all have software development activities to unlock the invention that's occurring inside of these organizations. And so the developer is a very important part of that overall ecosystem.

Although the most advanced software innovation may take place in big cities with research universities, there is a lot of work concerning the application of software to business processes and the administration and maintenance of software systems that can be done remotely.

The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future.

This is a software-powered world.

It is a high bar to say that it's more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

Microsoft is a company that manages imagination.

For instance, in 1999, Bill Gates not only published a new book on work at the speed of thought but also detailed how Microsoft's 'Falconview' software would enable the destruction of bridges in Kosovo.

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.

In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It's really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.