“Hello, World!” is the ultimate rite of passage in computer programming because it represents a time-honored historical tradition combined with a vital technical sanity check. The Historical Origin
The phrase originated in 1972 with computer scientist Brian Kernighan.
The Inspiration: Kernighan recalled seeing a cartoon of a chick hatching from an egg saying “Hello, World!”. The cheerful phrase stuck with him.
The B Manual: He first implemented the phrase as a small text assembly demo in an internal Bell Laboratories manual for the B programming language.
The C Explosion: The tradition solidified in 1978 when Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published The C Programming Language. As the first code example in the book, it was read by millions of budding Unix and C developers who went on to adopt the phrase across every future programming language they created or learned. Practical Technical Value
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