The "Hello, world!" formality

Sunil Jagadish — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:05:00 GMT

If you have been following my earlier blog, you know that I am Sunil Jagadish, a Microsoft Student Ambassador, pursuing Master of Computer Applications in RV College of Engineering (RVCE), Bangalore.. As I mentioned in the last post on Dotnetjunkies.com, comment spam succeded in forcing me to say “Good Bye!” to Dotnetjunkies. [listening to Hotel California (Eagles) as I type this...]

If you search through the archives of most of the technical blogs and look for the first post, you will find a “Hello World” post. I was wondering why I should be calling this post “Hello World” and looked into Wikipedia and this is what I found -

A "hello world" program is a computer program that prints out "Hello, world!" on a display device. It is used in many introductory tutorials for teaching a programming language and many students use it as their first programming experience in a language.

A "hello world" program can be a useful sanity test to make sure that a language's compiler, development environment, and run-time environment are correctly installed.

However, the first known instance of the usage of the words "hello" and "world" together in computer literature is in A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, by Brian Kernighan, 1973. [1] (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bintro.html)

Gramatically - “Hello, world!“ is the right way to say it, but some programming language syntax places constraints on the usage of strings.

All this is history. Something that is really cool and something that I had once planned to do is already there. A comprehensive collection of “Hello, world!” programs written in various programming languages. Its just awesome! A nice way to get an idea of what a programming language tastes like. The list if growing. Check it out.

If you would like to write to me, please feel free to drop a line at - suniljagadish AT gmail DOT com

Misc

The "Hello, world!" formality