Anders Hejlsberg

in a GUI, and that meant a new kind of application, right, that you had to create.

And at the same time, competitively, Microsoft had created Visual Basic, which was a very impressive product, but still had some of the very same flaws that we knew how to compete with, right?

In terms of interpreted versus compiled and extensible versus not, or not extensible versus ours that had classes and object orientation and blah, blah, blah.

First, we set out to build a Visual Basic competitor.

But then we also realized that, well, that's not really enough of an angle.

And then there was this other phenomenon that was happening at the time, which was called client-server applications.

Um, and there were a whole bunch of 4GL application development tools for database connected client server apps.

And so we set out to build a tool that was like as interactive and rapid application development as Visual Basic, but with a compiler behind it targeted also at client server enterprise apps.

And that was what Delphi was about, right?

It worked out really well.

I mean, that product to this day is still being used actively by a whole number of programmers.

I mean, Delphi was and is in some ways a wonderful way of building Windows desktop apps.

I mean, they had a great, you know, the VCL, the visual class library that allowed you to inherit components and install them on the pallet and make drag and drop work for your forms designers with components that you had built and whatever.

It was, it was pretty cool.

Well, the environment, particularly around the time where I joined Microsoft,

the mid-90s, Java had happened.

Well, the browser had happened, first of all, and JavaScript.

But JavaScript, no one really paid attention to JavaScript because that was just this little whatever thingy that was in the browser, you know, and it was slow and it was like, eh, no one uses that.

But then there was this Java thing that allowed you to create applets.

Oh, my God.