Hello, World !!!

When you start learning a new language, there are few common phrases to start e.g. Hello or Good Morning. Lets see how ‘Hello‘ is written in different languages.

In Spanish, Hola!

In Italian, Hola!

In Swedish, Hej!

In Indonesian, Halo!

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So is there a traditional way to learn new programming language ? Yes, it is. And the phrase is ‘Hello, World!!!‘. When you start to learn a new programming language, the first program is always ‘Hello, World!!!‘. It is a tradition to introduce novice programmers to programming language.

History of ‘Hello, World!’

The origin of this phrase is in an internal memorandum of Bell Laboratories, about C programming language, where example program was written. This example program was doing nothing but printing ‘hello, world’ on terminal with no capital letters or exclamation point. Bell Laboratories is home of many early innovations in computer science field. Before C, there was another language called BCPL. According to some sources, use of ‘hello, world’ is dated prior to C, in BCPL documentations.

‘Hello, World!’ in different programming languages

In C, which is a kind of Grand-daddy of modern computer languages,

#include <stdio.h>

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

Looks tough, eh ?

In Java,

public class HelloWorld {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World");
    }
}

In Python,

print("Hello, World !!!")

In Ruby,

puts "Hello, World !!!"

In Linux Assembly,

section     .text
global      _start                              ;must be declared for linker (ld)

_start:                                         ;tell linker entry point

    mov     edx,len                             ;message length
    mov     ecx,msg                             ;message to write
    mov     ebx,1                               ;file descriptor (stdout)
    mov     eax,4                               ;system call number (sys_write)
    int     0x80                                ;call kernel

    mov     eax,1                               ;system call number (sys_exit)
    int     0x80                                ;call kernel

section     .data

msg     db  'Hello, world!',0xa                 ;our dear string
len     equ $ - msg                             ;length of our dear string

Lisp this beautiful language has many flavours something like Mexican Spanish vs Spain Spanish and one of them is,

(format t "Hello, World!")

Some interesting facts

• TTHW or Time To Hello World is a metric to calculate how long it takes to run ‘Hello World’ program from scratch in given programming language.
• Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint provide a package called hello. Installation of this package is used as an example to newcomers of how to install a package. On successful installation of this package, new command is added to system called ‘hello’ which prints ‘Hello, world!‘ on terminal.

So which language does look simple in first glance ? Let us know in comments.