It’s generally customary in computer programming to make your first program in a new language execute the simple command of printing “Hello, world!” (in some variety of casing) to the screen.
The “Hello, world,” program is meant to be an easy first program for a student. Or, it can demonstrate that everything’s set up correctly. Here’s my first blog post, then!
Hello, world!
If you want to know more about the history of this particular tradition in programming, here’s a Wikipedia article (which, f.y.i., I just read because I was curious about it).
One thing I thought was interesting: the earliest instances of the “Hello, world” program seem to have come out of Bell Labs. Technically, they printed lower case “hello, world,” but that distinction isn’t important.
As an example (but not the first historical example), there’s a 1974 Bell Labs tutorial on the C language by Brian Kernighan.
There’s an even earlier tutorial on the B language, also by Kernighan in 1972, which had the same simple program. According to the author, so far as his knows this is the first historical instance of a “hello, world” program. Neat!
I think it’s interesting, though, that the use of “hello, world!” as an introduction probably predated its use in computer programming. Radio DJ William B. Williams (or “Willie B.”) used it as a sign-on when hosting the show Make Believe Ballroom as early as 1954.
This is neat. No, really, it is!
Art often predates technology. Sometimes, it’s the imagination of the artist that can inspire and drive the engineer to create.
Or, the everyday experiences of life can work their way as unconscious influences in the fields of math and engineering. Sometimes that’s for better, sometimes that’s for worse. Engineers and mathematicians are humans like the rest of us, and none of us are unbiased or truly objective beings.
I don’t actually know if Kernighan was influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by Williams’ radio show when selecting this as the text for his tutorial program. It’s nice to think about these things stirring around in the collective ether of human experience, though.
In any case, I found this fact serendipitous as I was writing this post. I plan to write about both art and technology here, and to begin the whole endeavor with an example of one influencing the other seemed especially appropriate.
So here it is: first post! Since you read all the way to the end, here’s a photo of my favorite coworker:
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