Hello dear readders
First of all, thanks for reading my first article: I hope you enjoy my website so far!
As I'm currently writing my first article, I remember my first time at programation... my first Hello World in Javascript.
console.log("Hello World");
Simple right ?
But, why do we use this sentence and not just "Test" like we all have done for debugging ?
Let's start learning
The programation begining
Maybe you don't know, but before everything, programation is no more than a succetion of 0 and 1 that is no more than instruction for the computer components. Then, some great people invented a language made to have clearer and more understandable syntax (because yeah, coding with 0 and 1 isn't fun), and the Assembly language was born.
But, Johan: that's just the history of programation! We don't care about the assembly language, we want to know why do all good programers write "Hello World" and not just "Test" ?
Hmm, yeah: I know. But to undertand where does this sentence come from, we need first to understand the start of programation.
The begining of the hello World usage
While small test programs have existed since the beginning of programming, the tradition of using hello world as a test message was started by the book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, published in 1978.
The first example in this book prints hello, world (without a capital letter or a period, but with a comma and a terminal newline). The first hello world that Kernighan and Ritchie remember came from a B language learning manual written by Kernighan. The 16-bit PDP-11 — one of the most popular computers of the time — helped spread the term, with users purchasing the book The C Programming Language to learn how to use the machine. In an interview with the Indian edition of Forbes magazine, Brian Kernighan explains that this phrase comes from a cartoon he had seen, where a chick came out of its egg saying "Hello, World!".
In the 21st century, programs more often display Hello, world! as a sentence, with capital letter, comma and final exclamation point.