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Comment by mkr-hn | Hacker News Reader

I came across this while looking into a question in the thread on Microsoft Edge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481043

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Thanks for the digg. Still not clear he's considered the father (definitely a mind-share contributor according to your link). Perhaps there was none, but usually there is front-person leading the charge for things like this w/in an organization.

I worked with Anders for years (he was on my interview loop, still no idea how I got in), and no, he's not the father of the CLR. That project (Project 42, COM+, NGWS, among other names) I think even pre-dated his arrival at MS. Anders was pretty focused on C#, which _was_ a direct consequence of the dust-up with Sun over Java. The MS Java libraries (WFC, etc), COM+, and C# sort of all converged to become what is considered CLR+.NET today. When VJ++ was killed via the Sun suit, the CLR was already in existance, but still pretty rough. It was a solid (fun, but painful) 3 years between when that happened and when .NET 1.0/VS 2002 shipped.

The "father" of the CLR is probably Mike Tougtangi, or Chris Brumme. I'm not exactly sure who was on that original team.

Who killed VB6 and thought VB.Net would be a good idea? I remember a long gone Channel 9 video where the VB guys had arguments for .Net and showed a demo of the third part transition tool, that ship as Lite-version with Visual Studio 2002/3.

The idea was that a converged, single, multi-language runtime and framework was the way to go. This is the way the culture works in Redmond - that's considered "strategic thinking", which is only exists in that bubble. It wasn't that the plan was bad, it's that it was unrealistic to think that the users of a very mature, very scenario-focused product would be happy with a V1 generalized product that was sorta-kinda the same thing. This was obviously false, and I actually fought against the porting tool because I didn't think it would work (it didn't), and just piss people off (it did). To keep VB6 alive until VB.net matured is anthetical to the way the place runs. Newer is _always_ better, even if it's not, and there lacked any incentive in the comp system for people to take care of the existing userbase. So, that's what happened.

> there lacked any incentive in the comp system for people to take care of the existing userbase

Can you explain that? Are there incentives to do other stuff?

The basic system - no. As of 2012 when I left, comp was about what your management was interested in. Maybe "take care of existing users" is on your review commitments, but what's really on there if you want to get ahead is: ship features, drive future business, etc. As such people wanted to work on the next new thing, it was relatively bad for careers to be on existing old things. Massive variations between groups, but basically that was the culture.

Thanks for sharing your experience, it helps to understand some of the business decisions.

This really puts into focus the meaning of "strategic thinking": abandoning current customers in favor of potential future customers.

Honestly there were a lot of bad design decisions in VB6 that needed breaking backward compatibility. Requiring to use "SET" to assign objects, parameters being BYREF by default, inconsistent base (1 or 0) for various collections. VB.net isn't that difficult to migrate to and when one gets used to it, it's hard to have much nostalgia for VB6.

Where you there when generics got brought in? What was that like from MS's side?

Yeah - this is where Anders shines. Generics were brought in primarily to avoid boxing/unboxing costs of value types, but really are incredibly powerful when used properly. And I'll say that generics in C#/.NET are done very well. Every time I use Java, I want to use generics until I remember Java's generics are confusing and almost useless.

I really miss having them when doing work in other languages, even with some of the covariance gotchas, they're just amazingly good.

I thought the CLR team had no plan/way to ship genetics in the CLR, and C# would have had to gone with erasure, like Java. That the first C# with generics came from across the Atlantic. Isn't that so?

According to Wikipedia [1] ("which never lies"):

> He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C#[1] and core developer on TypeScript.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

In 1996, Hejlsberg left Borland and joined Microsoft. One of his first achievements was the J++ programming language and the Windows Foundation Classes; [...] Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the language C#. In 2012 Hejlsberg announced his new project TypeScript—a superset of JavaScript. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

For better or worse, he influences with his C# syntax ideology now TypeScript and indirectly JS/ES6.

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