Shadowing Practice: Creator of C# and TypeScript: "AI will NEVER Replace Coders, Here's Why" | Anders Hejlsberg - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Will AI replace software engineers?
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Will AI replace software engineers?
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I am highly skeptical.
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Who's going to make the AI?
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AI is not going to innovate.
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Someone has to design the CPU, the operating system.
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AI is not going to do that.
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What are your opinions on vibe coding?
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That doesn't really bring a lot to the table anyway.
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That code has to come from somewhere.
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It's not all going to be generated by AI.
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When people are learning to code, what are some common mistakes you see people make?
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Not spending enough time.
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.
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How this industry makes progress.
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What was the story of you creating C Sharp?
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Well the story probably starts like with my Today I'm sitting down with Anders Halsberg, a technical fellow at Microsoft, to talk about the future of coding and AI.
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If you're in computer science or are a tech beginner, you need to pay attention.
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Because Anders is not just a tech leader, but he is the literal creator of programming languages C sharp and TypeScript.
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And so when he talks about AI and coding, he is speaking from decades worth of experience.
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And he dispels a lot of the lies and nonsense people have been spewing about AI.
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Plus, if you want to succeed and actually get ahead of most developers, he shares some crazy behind-the-scenes stories from building C Sharp and TypeScript,
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and I am confident that will change the way you think about coding projects going into the future.
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So a lot of value to unpack in this video, and let's get to it right away.
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In the world of AI that we live in today, a lot of people are even questioning, is it worth learning how to code?
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Oh, I absolutely think it's worth learning how to code.
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Programming languages and code is how AI expresses itself.
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And there's a whole different world from AI below
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that has to exist that AI assumes the existence of in the code that it generates.
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That code has to come from somewhere.
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It's not all going to be generated by AI.
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What are your opinions on Vibe coding is going to replace coders?
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I am highly skeptical.
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For a lot of stuff that is rote, how many times can you write this to-do list app?
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AI in its training set has seen it a gazillion times, so it can riff over that.
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And it can actually get more and more creative now.
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But when it comes down to business logic or you've got to invent something, that's how this industry makes progress, right?
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That's not going to come from AI.
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True, true.
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Like understanding the fundamentals.
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Yesterday, I got the opportunity to have a quick chat with Satya.
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I had asked him beginner level skills people need to know when they're getting into tech.
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He mentioned understanding the architecture.
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That's something AI can help you generate the code, but it won't do the fundamental design, which comes from the human mind.
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And you designed languages such as C-sharp and TypeScript, and were very cognizant what problems you were trying to solve.
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Rewinding the clock a little bit, what was the story of you creating C Sharp?
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Well, the story probably starts like with my previous endeavor there at a company called Borland, where I wrote Turbo Pascal and then worked also as the architect of a product called Delphi.
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This was all about making programmers more productive, rapid application development, and we competed with Microsoft's marquee product, Visual Basic.
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Right.
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And, you know, if you can't beat them, join them.
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So I joined Microsoft in 96.
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There was this thing called Visual Basic that was super easy to write apps in.
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And then there was this thing called C++ that is where all the expressiveness and performance was available.
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And people really wanted a little bit of both.
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And so we set out to create that sort of best of both worlds, the best of both worlds, you know, something that gave you the power and expressiveness of C++,
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but with the ease of use of Visual Basic.
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With a bunch of modern infrastructure behind it, called .NET.
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Are there any examples of features of the language that did both so you could explain to us?
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Things like properties and events.
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There were object-oriented programming languages already, but everyone was working with this notion of properties on their objects and events on their objects.
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But no programming languages had given first-class treatment to them before.
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Do you have any example of a great project to create with C-sharp?
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Any kind of web backend or REST API or write a game.
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I mean, like Unity, right?
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Like a third of the world's C-sharp programmers write games.
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It almost doesn't matter what you write.
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Once you start writing code, you start understanding how programming languages work and how to build data structures and how to get performance, how to measure performance.
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When you're learning, it's less important exactly what you write, but just the fact that you're writing.
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You could go write a framework or set a collection classes if you wanted to, it doesn't matter.
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Yeah, and did you think that C Sharp would be as big as it got to today?
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No, of course not.
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You never know, right?
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I mean, and yes, C Sharp, I am very proud that it stood the test of time.
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In fact, I was talking to someone earlier today
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that it's 25 years since we released C Sharp at the 2000 Professional Developers Conference.
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So 25 years, that's a long time for something to still be around and in widespread use.
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Fast forwarding a little into your journey.
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So TypeScript, right?
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Can you give us the story of that and what problem you were trying to solve?
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Really quick, as a software engineer, you would think writing code is what slows me down.
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But it's actually the small tasks that pile up the most.
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That's when I started using Superhuman Mail, which manages my inbox and keeps me organized without all the back and forth.
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And now I can connect it to tools like ChatGPT or Claude and actually manage my inbox from there.
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Let your AI agents run your inbox and calendar.
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Let me show you how I use this.
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I connected Superhuman Mail to Claude, and now I can run everything from here.
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One thing I use a lot is cross-tool workflows.
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For example, I can ask it to look through recent emails and summarize anything important, then send that straight into Slack.
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Or after meetings, I can have a draft of follow-ups based on my notes without opening my inbox.
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It removes a lot of the small tasks that usually add up.
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If you're afraid of your email sounding too AI-generated, you can insert rules just using no em dashes
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or ellipses to ensure you're all good to go and that it is in your tone of voice.
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The beauty is these rules will apply every time without having to edit each time to match your voice and tone.
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The biggest game changer for me was the AI to help me actually prepare for the day.
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It can collect all the tasks and insights that I have and help me create a to-do list.
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Set it up once and stay in control all year.
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Sign up for a superhuman mail today and get one month free with my link.
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Make sure to sign up for the business plan if you want to connect CLAW, ChatGPT, and other AI tools.
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And now back to the video.
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Well, Timescript, the story probably starts about 15 years ago when a team at Microsoft, the Outlook team, came to us, and I was doing C Sharp at the time,
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and they came to us and they asked, hey, could you guys productize this thing called Script Sharp?
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And I'm like, what's Script Sharp?
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Well, it's this thing that takes C Sharp and cross compiles it to JavaScript.
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Okay.
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And I'm like, okay.
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And why would someone want to do that?
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Well, we do that because that's the only way that we can get great tooling and scalability for a large project.
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And we're writing this enormous app in JavaScript because at the time,
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everyone was moving to the browser and JavaScript as the true cross-platform solution.
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You know, there was like a whole diversity of device form factors coming out like phones and tablets and the PC wasn't,
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you couldn't just assume that it was going to run on a PC.
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And so browser was it.
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And HTML5 had happened and you could actually write decent UI, right?
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And so people were just writing enormous apps in JavaScript and having a very hard time doing it.
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And this team had chosen to solve the problem by writing the app in C Sharp and cross-compiling it to JavaScript.
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And I'm like, but that's crazy.
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Surely you're not going to write best of breed JavaScript apps by writing them in C Sharp.
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Wouldn't you rather write them in JavaScript? what is it about JavaScript that's broken and can we fix it?
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And so that was sort of the genesis of TypeScript, fixed JavaScript, if you will.
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Make it usable for large scale projects and add those things to the language
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that are necessary such that we can build great tooling on top.
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And in particular, that meant adding a static type system to the language.
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We then enable the ability to write great tool that you see in say, Visual Studio Code and our language.
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So more like the developer experience exactly
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because that's ultimately where the productivity comes from right it's like having things like statement completion
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and code navigation and seeing red squigglies when you make a mistake
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and whatever that's what developers love
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that stuff yeah once you give it to them you can never take it away again yeah
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so python developers might disagree slightly but well they might
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but you know what i don't know that people are writing million line apps or programs in Python to the same extent.
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Once something gets big enough, you really do need these things.
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That readability in TypeScript.
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Yeah.
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As the creator of C-sharp and TypeScript, when people are learning to code, what are some common mistakes you see people make?
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Not spending enough time learning the basic principles and really sort of understand what is it I'm doing?
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What is a variable really?
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And what is an array?
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And what is a data structure?
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And how do pointers work?
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Once you grok
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that, then it doesn't really matter what language you're in you
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know that's just a veneer on top of the semantics right
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but really understanding the semantics is super important because
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that allows you to think in a more abstract fashion
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if you don't get that deeper understanding of it then you're sort of thinking at
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that veneer syntactic level of what do i have to write
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but you're not really understanding why you're writing it interesting
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if i'm a beginner in tech and i wanted to get hired at a big tech a company like Microsoft, what is your number one piece of advice?
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Write a bunch of open source code, put it on GitHub, that becomes your resume.
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There's nothing like demonstrating the ability to code.
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And a fantastic way to demonstrate that is by building stuff and putting it out in the open.
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Yeah.
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So don't sit on it, share it.
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Yeah.
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And particularly with AI in the world that we live in, are there certain problems that you would choose to tackle?
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It depends on what kind of programming excites you, because there are many different things you could do.
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Some people like building apps, the UI aspect of it
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and the experience of the app other people like systems like stuff
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that doesn't have a ui at all or
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but it's like they're into making it perform incredibly well
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and you know that some people like the theory of it all right and
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so there are many different ways you can dive into it
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i mean for me i've always been fascinated with writing efficient data structures
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and understanding how they work how does a hash table work?
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Why does it work?
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And how do I make it more efficient?
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How can I structure the data in my program the right way?
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Because ultimately, that's where the performance comes from.
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Right, right.
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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It's like the small design choices that affect so much.
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And do you think a computer science degree is worth it?
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Oh, I definitely think so.
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You know, I was sort of somewhat self-taught because at the time I went to college back in Denmark, I grew up in Denmark,
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The engineering school I went to didn't even have computer science yet.
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They started it the following year, right?
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But I was like in the late 70s.
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You could go to the other university for computer science, but I was doing engineering.
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And so a lot of things I sort of had to learn by myself by doing.
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Boy, I could have saved a lot of time by getting an education
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that allows you to understand like the history of programming.
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And like we've talked about here, like what is a programming language?
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What are the principles of programming?
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What is data structures?
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What are databases?
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What are operating systems? like all of this stuff it certainly
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helps to have a passion for it you know for me i sometimes joke i never had a real job
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because i was always doing my hobby coding was always my hobby right then i was fortunate yeah
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if you aim to do your best work you there's got
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to be a bit of passion in it you know right for sure
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and one final question will ai replace software engineers no who's gonna make the AI, right?
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And who's going to make the programming languages that the AI expresses itself in?
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And who's going to write the frameworks that the AI talk?
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I mean, no, AI is an accelerant and it's going to change the way that we do things.
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And it's going to remove a lot of grunt work
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that we don't need to do anymore because AI can help us do it, but it'll allow us to focus more on the creative side because AI is not going to innovate.
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It's not going to like, Bing, have this crazy idea I had in the shower this morning, you know, AI doesn't work that way.
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Right, right.
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So right now, as a software engineer, we code five years from now when AI is more into the workflow.
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More pervasive.
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What do you see software engineers do?
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AI will be able to do a lot of that grunt work.
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But like I said, there's still the deeper side of the science.
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These frameworks that you have to target, someone has to design the CPU, someone has to design the operating systems.
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There's plenty left.
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Someone has to get the right idea
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and devise the right data structure for sharding this app so our startup can grow fast or what have you, right?
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AI is not going to do that, but it's going to help you with these like, yeah, okay, the grunt work of writing a test for a pull request is fine.
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That doesn't really bring a lot to the table anyway.
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So yeah, hand that off.
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Sweet.
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Well, that's about all I have in this video.
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I really hope that you guys enjoyed it.
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And if you did, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe if you haven't already.
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If you're interested in my absolutely free tech newsletter, link for that down below in the description.
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And if you're interested in watching the conversation I had with the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, you might want to click right here.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, learners will explore the insights of Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of the C# and TypeScript programming languages. As a technical leader at Microsoft, he shares valuable perspectives on the relationship between artificial intelligence and coding. This session will not only enhance your understanding of technical discussions but also improve your English speaking skills through shadowing. By the end of this lesson, you will have practiced key vocabulary and phrases related to technology, coding, and AI, while also refining your pronunciation and speech fluency.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) - Advanced machine learning systems that perform tasks requiring human intelligence.
- Code - The set of instructions written in a programming language to be executed by a computer.
- Innovation - The process of creating new ideas or products to improve existing technologies.
- Business logic - The part of the software that dictates how data is created, displayed, stored, and changed.
- Architecture - The structure of a system or application, including the organization of components and their relationships.
- Rote - Learning through repetition without understanding the underlying concepts.
- Shadowing - A language learning technique where students listen to and repeat spoken words to improve pronunciation and fluency.
Practice Tips
To effectively use shadowing techniques with this video, engage in the following steps to improve your English pronunciation:
- Initial Viewing: Watch the video without attempting to speak. Focus on understanding the content, tone, and pace of Anders Hejlsberg's speech.
- Pause and Repeat: After identifying phrases that resonate, pause the video and repeat aloud. Pay attention to the intonation and clarity of each word. This method is particularly useful for difficult vocabulary like "innovation" and "architecture."
- Slow Down: If the video's speed feels overwhelming, consider using tools available on many shadowing sites to reduce speed. This will help you grasp the nuances in pronunciation and context.
- Multimodal Practice: To further engage with the material, try writing down key phrases, then incorporate them into your own sentences. This will assist in reinforcing vocabulary through practice in different contexts.
- Record Yourself: Record your voice as you shadow. Listening to your recording will help you assess your pronunciation and identify areas for improvement.
- Regular Review: Consistently revisit this material. Repeated exposure will solidify your understanding and improve your shadow speech skills.
By integrating these techniques into your learning routine, you will significantly improve your English speaking abilities, allowing you to engage more confidently in technical discussions like those about coding and AI.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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