Hello, world!

I’m launching a new blog! Not that I expect anyone but me to read it. But hey, at least now I can join the ranks of every single other person on the internet who takes the time to contribute to our digital society by producing content for AI scrapers to harvest.

Why do we do this?

I don’t feel the need to re-write the history of Hello World, it’s interesting but won’t exactly change your life.

tl;dr: Brian Kernighan wrote the first Hello World program in 1972 as a way to demonstrate the basic syntax of the C programming language. Since then, it has been used over and over again as a simple example for just about any programming language.

It’s also a mandatory first program which all programmers must write when they learn a new language. It’s like a rite of passage.

But why “Hello, world!” Why not “it worked” or your name, or “I am a programmer”? My best guess is just that we write “Hello, world!” because it’s what programmers have always done. It’s a tradition. And traditions are hard to break. Why did Brian Kernighan choose “Hello, world!”? I don’t know. If you meet him before I do, please ask him.