Wondering how 'hello world' started?

When people start learning anything new in programming, the first code they write is usually called... well 'hello world'. If you're like me, you've always wondered the origin of this phrase in programming.

That started somewhere around the 1970s, when the C programming language was being developed at Bell Labs. The very first publication of it was a simple C program that output the string 'hello, world' and a newline character.

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

Today's hello world applications look a little bit different. There's no comma after the hello, and there is usually no need for a new line at the end of world.

def hello():
    print ("hello world")

For me personally, programming has been one of the most fascinating things I've ever learned. I learned programming in qBASIC from an old book I had chanced upon in my high school library. I found it very challenging and different. The sheer power of creativity that came along with it kept me motivated to go on and on; in the process exploring basic data structures and understanding really old algorithms like the bubble sort and insertion sort. I have gone on and on to write at least a dozen hello world applications in different programming languages and platforms. Needless to say it creates a good starting point for writing much more complex solutions. Cheers to learning! Connect with me on Github.