Anders Hejlsberg

nders Hejlsberg has come a long way from writing BASIC code on early desktop computers in his hometown of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Hejlsberg, who now oversees the design of programming languages at Microsoft, was the chief designer and architect of C#, a programming language that extends the object-oriented qualities of both C++

and Java. He also led the design of the Windows Foundation Classes, a technology in Microsoft Visual J++ that allows Java developers to build Windows applications.

Alex Burdenko, senior architect at solution provider Back Bay Technologies, Needham, Mass., says, "[Hejlsberg] continues [to innovate], adding state-of-the-art language constructs to C# such as Generics, Enumerated Types, Partial Types, Iterators and Anonymous Methods that make software development more robust and less error-prone,to the benefit of all software developers."

Like physicist Richard Feynman, Hejlsberg strives to make complex ideas simpler to understand. This philosophy underscores his future plans to promote declarative programming, which the Microsoft engineer says will allow developers "to talk less how to do things and more about what they want done and have computers reason it out."