In calm thoughts, these two words (with the comma) bring to mind plenty of images. More often that not, I hold “hello, world” in fond remembrances. For this post I’ve slightly modified the default WordPress post title, in favor of the original Kernighan‘s form: no capitalization and presence of comma. Through the years, it seems to me that this sequence lightens my worries when coping with new languages, systems, things. Somehow, the mind has understood that once “hello, world” is done, then reaching the entire system is achievable. Kind of Pavlovian Conditioning, I guess.
In K&R’s C Tutorial, this feel at ease perception it’s also intended:
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages: Print the words hello, world. This is the basic hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went.
This way, “hello, world” should be our first step for pummeling through the new beast (language).
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