Origin of Hello World

When we start learning some programming languages or watching some tutorials, the very first code example we will come across is displaying a greeting message. Most probably message will be

“Hello World” or “Hello World!”

* ignore the case

If we can see this two words in our output, we believe that we achieve something and everything loads, or works as expected. It’s a test, signifying a start to a program. Over the past several decades, it’s grown to become a time-honored tradition. Once the Hello World is displayed in the Output window, internally in our mind we appreciate ourselves like Yeah! we did it. (beginner stage of programmer life; of course, someone still has the enthusiasm after years & years of experience).

The following is my first hello world program I have used in my attempt at learning programming like everyone else

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
        printf("hello, world\n");
}

Where did it come from?

The tradition of using the phrase “Hello world!” as a test message was influenced by an example program in the seminal book The C Programming Language. The example program from that book prints “hello, world” (without capital letters or exclamation mark), and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version:

 main() {
        printf("hello, world");
 }

The first known instance of the usage of the words “hello” and “world” together in computer literature occurred earlier, in Kernighan’s 1972 Tutorial Introduction to the Language, with the following code:

main( ) {
  extrn a, b, c;
  putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

 

After that people started using the same greeting message in books, demos, and tutorials for lots of programming language like Java, C#, etc.

That’s it.

So, Hello World!

Happy Coding!

 

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s