A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski, November 3rd, 2025
Welcome to the 86th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Borland. In this edition, we explain to younger generations what the name "Borland" meant to older cohorts of software engineers; in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video about OOP by Borland’s founder Philippe Kahn; and in the Library section, we review "Masterminds of Programming" by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden, focusing in particular on the interview of Anders Hejlsberg.
by Adrian Kosmaczewski
On November 1988, Byte Magazine published two separate editions; first, the standard monthly issue, focused on the newly introduced NeXT computer; and the "Fifth Annual Extra All-IBM Issue" focused on the IBM PC, both of which are thankfully available on the Internet Archive at the time of this writing. Both of these magazines feature the same expensive advertising on pages 2 to 5, showcasing products from a company called Borland.
How did companies sell Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) to the masses back in the early 1990s, during the "Peak Of Inflated Expectations" of the OOP hype cycle? We have already seen such an example in the Vidéothèque section of this magazine, in which Steve Jobs would demonstrate how to build an application using objects on a NeXT computer. In this month’s entry, we will learn about OOP concepts from one of Borland’s founders and chairmen, Philippe Kahn himself.
Among all the books featured in the Library section of this magazine, there is one that has been mentioned particularly often, again and again. We are talking about the excellent "Masterminds of Programming: Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages" by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden, published by O'Reilly in 2009. It is high time that we dedicated a full entry to this gem, focusing on one of the interviews in particular: that of Anders Hejlsberg.