Hello world: A new start!

If you come from a programming background, you must be familiar with “Hello world” already. Newborns have the urge to greet the world and they do it with 100% energy. They greet the world with enthusiasm. This is no exception in case of programming and technology. “Hello world” is not just a simple text. It signifies the beginning of something new. Every programmer starts learning from “Hello world” and these two words hold great importance in next learning phase.

The history

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,

Purpose

“Hello World” is so simple that a person with little or no experience in computer language can understand it. Not only it is useful in checking if compiler and IDE are working, it also gives the user a basic understanding of programming language semantics.

So the next time you start learning a new language, start with “Hello world” and take it rather as a sign of energy and enthusiasm.