hello world,
Thats the only greeting we programmers know of.
Namaste, ram-ram, bonjour, satstriyakal - They sound familiar but we dont quite know what they mean.
So, hello world!
We swear by Cormen, Codechef and Spoj and Google. This is all we drink, eat and shit.
If they sound alien, then you are an alien too, to us.
So without any further delay, here is our first post!
Ctrl + F9
“hello, world”
What this means to a programmer is no less than Neil Armstrong’s “A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind” or Jawahar Lal Nehru’s midnight speech.
What has now become synonymous with the first program to be taught in any language first appeared as an example program in the book The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie. It 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");
}
Though this is widely accepted as the first occurrence , the first time words “hello” and “world” were used together dates back to 1972 in Kernighan's Tutorial Introduction to the Language B. Yes before C there was B, now you may be thinking there is a D too, there indeed is, but there is C++ too, that comes somewhere in between.
Below is a code in language Ada , that does the same thing. The language is named after Lady Ada Lovelace, who is credited as the history’s first programmer.
with Ada.Text_IO;
procedure Hello is
begin
Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line ("hello, world");
end Hello ;
What this means to me is , I have had a dream , more of a wish, from the first day of my class XIth when I was introduced to this small bit of program, that one day, I will stand like Gustav Graves does in Die Another Day, and say “hello, world” in the manner he says “Let there be light”.
