Anders Hejlsberg

Like Google did their excellent work on V8 and all of a sudden make JavaScript a fairly performant programming language.

HTML5 got ratified and we were getting to a point now where you could actually build real UIs in JavaScript.

And there was this device revolution that the iPhone set off

And all of a sudden we have all of these different form factors.

It's not just Windows PCs on the desktop anymore.

It's all sorts of diverse devices, but lo and behold, they all run browsers with JavaScript in.

Lo and behold, the real cross-platform language isn't Java, it's JavaScript.

Exactly.

And so the world started opening its eyes to that and started building larger and larger applications in JavaScript.

And we saw that externally, but also internally.

And one of the trigger events was when the outlook.com team came to the C-Sharp team and asked us whether we would

pretty please productize this thing called ScriptSharp.

And we go, well, what is, what is ScriptSharp?

It's this cross compiler that allows you to cross compile C sharp into JavaScript such that you can

basically treat JavaScript as an instruction language and run your C-sharp apps in a browser.

And I'm like, well, why would anyone want to do that?

Well, because then you can get a grown-up programming language with grown-up tooling.

You can use Visual Studio.

You can have projects.

You can do all of these wonderful things, you know, that you can't do with JavaScript because JavaScript is just a scripting language with shitty tooling.