Hello, World!

" program
"Hello World" redirects here. For other uses, see Hello World (disambiguation).
A "Hello, World!" program generally is a computer program that outputs or displays
the message "Hello, World!". Such a program is very simple in most programming
languages, and is often used to illustrate the basic syntax of a programming
language. It is often the first program written by people learning to code.[1][2] It can also
be used as a sanity test to make sure that a computer language is correctly installed,
and that the operator understands how to use it.

A. History[edit]

"Hello, World!" program by Brian Kernighan (1978)

While small test programs have 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 1978 book The C Programming Language.[3] The example program in
that book prints "hello, world", and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal
memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial:[4]

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

In the above example, the main( ) function defines where the program should start executing.
The function body consists of a single statement, a call to the printf function, which stands for
"print formatted". This function will cause the program to output whatever is passed to it as
the parameter, in this case the string hello, world, followed by a newline character.
The C language version was preceded by Kernighan's own 1972 A Tutorial Introduction to the
Language B,[5] where the first known version of the program is found in an example used to
illustrate external variables:

main( ) {
extern a, b, c;
 putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}

a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

The program also prints hello, world! on the terminal, including a newline character. The
phrase is divided into multiple variables because in B, a character constant is limited to
four ASCII characters. The previous example in the tutorial printed hi! on the terminal, and the
phrase hello,  world! was introduced as a slightly longer greeting that required several
character constants for its expression.
The Jargon File claims that "Hello, World!" originated instead with BCPL (1967).[6] This claim is
supposedly supported by the archived notes of the inventors of BCPL, Brian
Kernighan at Princeton and Martin Richards at Cambridge. The phrase predated by over a
decade its usage in computing; as early as the 1950s, it was the catchphrase of radio disc
jockey William B. Williams.[7]

B. Variations[edit]

A "Hello, world!" program running on Sony's PlayStation Portable as a proof of concept

"Hello, World!" programs vary in complexity between different languages. In some languages,
particularly scripting languages, the "Hello, World!" program can be written as a single statement,
while in others (particularly many low-level languages) there can be many more statements
required. For example, in Python, to print the string Hello, World! followed by a newline, one
only needs to write  print("Hello, World!") . In contrast, the equivalent code in C+
+ [1] requires the import of the input/output software library, the manual declaration of an entry
point, and the explicit instruction that the output string should be sent to the standard output
stream. Generally, programming languages that give the programmer more control over the
machine will result in more complex "Hello, World" programs.[8]
The phrase "Hello World!" has seen various deviations in punctuation and casing, such as the
presence of the comma and exclamation mark, and the capitalization of the leading H and W.
Some devices limit the format to specific variations, such as all-capitalized versions on systems
that support only capital letters, while some esoteric programming languages may have to print a
slightly modified string. For example, the first non-trivial Malbolge program printed "Hello world",
this having been determined to be good enough.[9] Other human languages have been used as
the output; for example, a tutorial for the Go programming language outputted both English and
Chinese or Japanese characters, demonstrating the programming language's built-
in Unicode support.[10]
A "Hello, World!" message being displayed through long-exposure light painting with a moving strip
of LEDs

Some languages change the functionality of the "Hello, World!" program while maintaining the
spirit of demonstrating a simple example. Functional programming languages, such
as Lisp, ML and Haskell, tend to substitute a factorial program for "Hello, World!", as functional
programming emphasizes recursive techniques, whereas the original examples emphasize I/O,
which violates the spirit of pure functional programming by producing side effects. Languages
otherwise capable of printing "Hello, World!" (Assembly, C, VHDL) may also be used
in embedded systems, where text output is either difficult (requiring additional components or
communication with another computer) or nonexistent. For devices such
as microcontrollers, field-programmable gate arrays, and CPLDs, "Hello, World!" may thus be
substituted with a blinking LED, which demonstrates timing and interaction between components.
[11][12][13][14][15]

The Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions provide the "Hello, World!" program through

their software package manager systems, which can be invoked with the command hello. It
serves as a sanity check and a simple example of installing a software package. For developers,
it provides an example of creating a .deb package, either traditionally or using debhelper, and the
version of hello used, GNU Hello, serves as an example of writing a GNU program.[16]
Variations of the "Hello, World!" program that produce a graphical output (as opposed to text
output) have also been shown. Sun demonstrated a "Hello, World!" program in Java based
on scalable vector graphics,[17] and the XL programming language features a spinning Earth
"Hello, World!" using 3D computer graphics.[18] Mark Guzdial and Elliot Soloway have suggested
that the "hello, world" test message may be outdated now that graphics and sound can be
manipulated as easily as text.[19]

C. Time to Hello World[edit]

"Time to hello world" (TTHW) is the time it takes to author a "Hello, World!" program in a given
programming language. This is one measure of a programming language's ease-of-use; since
the program is meant as an introduction for people unfamiliar with the language, a more complex
"Hello, World!" program may indicate that the programming language is less approachable.[8] The
concept has been extended beyond programming languages to APIs, as a measure of how
simple it is for a new developer to get a basic example working; a faster time indicates an easier
API for developers to adopt.[20][21]