Hello World Program - History

History

While small test programs existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition of using the phrase "Hello, world!" as a test message was influenced by an example program in the seminal book The C Programming Language. The example program from that book prints "hello, world" (without capital letters or exclamation mark), and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version:

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

The first known instance of the usage of the words "hello" and "world" together in computer literature occurred earlier, in Kernighan's 1972 Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, with the following code:

main( ) { extrn a, b, c; putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n'); } a 'hell'; b 'o, w'; c 'orld';


For modern languages, the hello world program tends to subtly grow in sophistication. For example, the Go programming language introduced a multilingual hello world program, Sun demonstrated a Java hello world based on scalable vector graphics, and the XL programming language features a spinning Earth hello world using 3D graphics.

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