Philippe Kahn

The cheap, fast compiler. Kahn, a French mathematician, co-founded Borland in California in 1983 and sold Turbo Pascal, written by Danish programmer Anders Hejlsberg, for $49.95 through magazine adverts, when compilers usually cost hundreds of dollars. Editing, compiling and running in one fast program made the edit-compile cycle almost instant and set the pattern for integrated development environments. Hejlsberg later created C# and TypeScript at Microsoft.