You know, when you step up to a podium to give
a big speech, you don't just like immediately
launch right into your opening sentence. What's
the very first thing you do? Oh, you lean in,
tap the microphone, maybe blow into it a little
bit. Right. You ask, is this thing on? Exactly.
And that deeply human need to make sure the pipes
are connected before we turn on the water, it's
universal. We need to know the basic machinery
is functioning before we pour our hearts out
to the audience. Yeah, for sure. And that exact
instinct is why, for the last 50 years, almost
every software developer on Earth has started
their programming journey with two simple words.
Hello, world. It really is the ultimate sanity
check. I mean, you aren't really trying to communicate
with the world. You're just proving to yourself
that the compiler is running, the software is
actually installed, and the basic pathways of
communication between you and the machine are
open. Right, so today, for you, our listener,
we are going to do a custom -tailored deep dive
to unpack how this tiny, seemingly trivial snippet
of code became a global standard. because hello
world isn't just a greeting, it's really a mirror
reflecting the evolution of technology itself.
What's fascinating here is that while this presents
itself as a basic syntax exercise for beginners,
it actually acts as a perfect lens to view the
entire history of human computer interaction.
Oh, totally. If you look at how different programming
languages handle this one simple task, you instantly
see the friction, the hardware limitations, and
like the specific philosophies of the people
who built them. Yeah, so to understand how this
specific phrase conquered the globe. We have
to look at where it came from. And that means
stepping back in time, away from the sleek, high
-powered laptops of today, and into the buzzing,
humming, physically massive computer rooms of
early Bell Labs in the 1970s. Right. The birthplace
of so much of our modern computing infrastructure.
And the tradition was largely popularized by
a famously influential 1978 book called The TC
Programming Language. By Brian Kernahan and Dennis
Ritchie. Right. Yep. Exactly. In that book, the
very first example program prints, hello world,
in all lowercase letters. But the trail actually
goes back even further than that 1978 book. Kernaghan
was using it in a 1974 internal Bell Labs memo
titled Programming in C. a tutorial. Right, right.
And if we dig all the way down to the bedrock,
we find the absolute first documented use of
the phrase in computing. It was in a 1972 tutorial.
Kernaghan wrote for an earlier programming language
simply called B. Which was the direct predecessor
to C. And the reason he chose that specific phrase
in 1972 was not out of some poetic desire to
greet the universe. He was actually trying to
teach around a brutal hardware limitation. Computers
back then had memory capacity so small we can
barely comprehend them today. Every single byte
of storage was precious real estate. Here's where
it gets really interesting. Because of those
severe hardware constraints, the B programming
language had this bizarre technical limitation.
A character constant was physically limited to
just four ASCII characters. Four characters,
that's it. Meaning the computer could only hold
four letters in a specific memory container at
one time. You couldn't just tell the machine
to remember a whole sentence. No, it would completely
overload the memory register. Yeah. So in the
tutorial, the very first example Kernane used
simply printed, Hi. Just hi. Yeah, that's three
characters an H and I and an exclamation point
it fit perfectly into that four character limit
But like hi doesn't teach a student how to manage
complex data Kernan wanted to teach programmers
how to string multiple variables together to
form a cohesive output So he introduced hello
world Which if you include the new line character
at the end to move the cursor down is much longer
than four characters, right? He deliberately
created an obstacle Exactly. It specifically
forced the programmer to chop the greeting up.
They had to store hell in one variable, ow in
another, orl in another, and then stitch them
all back together on the screen. It's wild. The
most famous greeting in digital history... exists
primarily because high was too short to be a
good homework assignment. He needed a phrase
just long enough to break the system's four -character
limit so you could show you the mechanism for
fixing it. I love the practicality of that so
much. Now, like all great computing lore, the
origins are slightly contested. The famous jargon
file, which is a glossary of hacker slang, traces
the conceptual origin back a few years earlier
to 1967 with a language called BCPL. Which heavily
influenced the B language. Right. But outside
of computing entirely, the exact phrase, hello
world, has a totally analog origin. It was actually
the trademark catchphrase of a New York radio
disc jockey named William B. Williams, starting
way back in the 1950s. Wow. Yeah. Long before
programmers were typing it into green screen
terminals, it was echoing across the radio waves
to millions of listeners. It's just such a bizarre
collision of cultures. A 1950s radio DJ catchphrase
eventually becomes the solution to a 1970s Bell
Labs memory constraint. Yeah. Which then becomes
the universal standard for coding. It's amazing.
Okay, let's impact this a bit more. We know when
and why it was born. But how do different languages
tackle this exact same prompt today? Because
comparing them reveals vast differences in how
computer languages are architected. Oh, completely.
For instance, if you sit down to learn a modern
scripting language like Python, getting your
computer to say hello is delightfully frictionless.
It takes exactly one line of code. You type print,
open a parenthesis, put, hello world, in quotes,
and you're done. the computer speaks, but then
you contrast Python with a language like C++.
Right. C++ is, well, it's the heavy machinery
of the programming world. To do the exact same
thing, just print those two words. C++ makes
you jump through hoops. You have to write a line
to import the C++ standard and output stream
library. Then you have to declare an entry point.
which is the main function. Then you have to
write a specific command std .cout to push the
text to the output console, followed by another
command to return a zero to the operating system
to prove the program ran without crashing. It
looks like a whole paragraph of technical jargon
just to say hello. Right. And honestly, I have
to push back on this design philosophy a little.
If Python can do it in one intuitive line, and
C++ requires all this boilerplate, all these
extra steps and imports just to accomplish the
exact same task, doesn't that make C++ a fundamentally
worse tool? Like, why use a language that makes
the simplest task so incredibly complicated?
Well, you know, every new programmer asks that
exact question when they stare at their first
C++ moment. But if we connect this to the bigger
picture, complexity is not necessarily a flaw.
It's really a reflection of language's intended
power, and specifically, it's proximity to the
actual physical hardware. Wait, when you say
proximity to the hardware, do you mean C++ is
actually talking directly to the physical microchips
while Python is going through some kind of translator?
That is a great way to think about it, yeah.
Imagine ordering takeout. versus working in a
commercial kitchen. Python is ordering takeout.
You tell an app, bring me a pizza. and an hour
later, a pizza arrives at your door. You don't
have to worry about chopping onions, preheating
the oven, or sourcing the cheese. Python hides
all the complex memory allocation and hardware
instructions from you, so you can just focus
on the final product. Which is great if you just
want a quick pizza. Exactly. Right. But C++ is
walking into a massive, industrial commercial
kitchen. If you want a pizza in that kitchen,
you have to manually turn on the gas lines, you
have to allocate the exact amount of flour, you
have to actively... the oven temperature. That
sounds exhaust. For a single pizza, or in this
case, printing, hello world, it is an exhausting,
overcomplicated nightmare. But if you're trying
to feed 10 ,000 people simultaneously, like building
a high -performance 3D video game engine or a
new operating system, you absolutely need that
granular absolute control over every single gas
line and ingredient. C++ forces you to be explicit
about memory and execution from line one, because
it's preparing you for industrial scale work.
That makes perfect sense. The language is setting
the terms of engagement early on. And speaking
of which, languages often use Hello World to
show off their specific superpowers right out
of the gate. Well, for sure. Look at the Go programming
language. In their introductory tutorial, the
Hello World program emits text in English, Chinese,
and Japanese simultaneously. Right. It isn't
just saying hello. It's proving a technical capability.
Right. Go was designed with native Unicode support
built directly into the language, meaning it
understands global alphabet. without requiring
developers to download extra translation plugins.
It's flexing its muscles on day one. Then you
have Rust. Rust is a language intensely focused
on safety, structure, and preventing memory leaks.
Its built -in package manager automatically generates
a perfectly formatted hello world program the
absolute second you create a new project folder.
That's convenient. Yeah, you don't even have
to type it. It's just sitting there waiting to
be compiled. It acts as an immediate sanity check.
before you even touch the keyboard. But we also
have to look at the dark side of this spectrum,
the esoteric languages. Oh, man. We have to talk
about Malbolge. Yes. For those listening who
aren't familiar, Malbolge is an esoteric programming
language explicitly designed by its creator to
be as difficult to use as humanly possible. It's
awful. It is a puzzle of computational pain.
It took two full years after the language was
released to the public before the very first
working hello world. program was announced. Two
years. Just to get a computer to print a greeting.
Two years. And mind -blowingly, a human being
didn't even write it. No. The syntax is so chaotic
and non -intuitive that a human couldn't figure
it out. The code was actually produced by a separate
algorithm written in an entirely different language
called Common Lisp, which basically brute -forced
its way into finding the right sequence of symbols.
And after all that monumental effort, the output
it produced was slightly mangled. It printed,
hello world, with strange, inconsistent capitalization.
That horror story perfectly highlights a crucial
concept in the tech industry. I mean, if a language
takes two years to print a greeting, you have
a massive usability problem. And this brings
us to a vital industry metric, time to hello
world or TTHW. Time to hello world. I love that
the industry took this inside joke and turned
it into an actual measurable metric for success.
It's brilliant. TTHW is exactly what it sounds
like. It's the amount of time it takes a completely
new user to author and successfully run a hello
world program in a given programming language
or environment. It serves as a strict parameter
for approachability. I mean, think about your
own workflow for a second. The last time you
downloaded a new app or tried a new piece of
software at your job, how quickly could you get
a basic win? How fast could you do the simplest
possible thing this software was designed to
do? Well, if you open a new tool and it takes
you like three hours just to figure out how to
create a blank document, you're going to close
the window and find a different tool. Exactly.
The human brain craves that early dopamine hit
of success. A shorter time to hello world indicates
an easier adoption curves. It means the creators
of the language have successfully removed the
early friction. And what is really interesting
is that this concept has expanded far beyond
just programming languages. PTHW is now widely
used to measure API's application programming
interfaces. So when a tech company releases a
new API, say, a tool for processing credit card
payments on a website or pulling live weather
data into a mobile app, they're actually tracking
how fast a new developer can get a basic successful
test transaction running. Precisely. If a payment
processor's API requires a developer to read
50 pages of documentation just to process a fake
$1 test charge, their time to hello world is
too long. Yeah, nobody is reading that. Right.
Developers will literally just choose a competitor's
API. It has become a metric of survival in the
tech marketplace. Make your microphone easy to
tap. or no one will bother speaking into it.
So if the entire tech industry is obsessed with
making time to Hello World as fast and painless
as possible, it begs a massive question. OK.
Why do some modern programming environments intentionally
make it impossible to print those words at all?
This is where Hello World transcends text and
becomes an abstract concept. You start running
into environments where printing text either
goes against the fundamental philosophy of the
language or is blocked by the physical reality
of the hardware. Right, let's start with the
philosophical holdouts. There's a whole branch
of computing called functional programming languages
like Lisp, ML, and Haskell. Now, I'm not a functional
programming expert, but from what I understand,
these languages operate on very strict mathematical
purity. They do, yeah. In pure functional programming,
functions are supposed to act like sealed pristine
mathematical boxes. You put a specific input
into the box, and you get a specific output.
Crucially, the function is not supposed to cause
any side effects in the outside world. Wait,
so just displaying a word on a screen is considered
breaking the rules. How is that a side effect?
Well, because to display the word hello, the
computer has to physically alter the state of
its monitor. It has to change the color of the
pixels. It's reaching outside of its sealed mathematical
box to manipulate the external environment. Oh,
wow. Yeah. So in this strict, pure, functional
programming community, traditional input -output
operations like printing text to a console are
frowned upon in early learning stages because
they teach bad habits. So they don't use Hello
World at all. Instead, the typical introductory
program for these languages is a factorial calculator.
They substitute a recursive math problem for
a greeting because calculating a factorial perfectly
demonstrates the recursive, side -effect -free
nature of the language without ever needing to
alter the state of a monitor. Exactly. The sanity
check changes to match the cultural values of
the community. Okay, so philosophical purity
is one reason to abandon the text greeting. Physical
reality is the other. Let's talk about hardware.
For embedded systems, text isn't just frowned
upon, it's often physically impossible. Oh, definitely.
We're talking about microcontrollers, field -programmable
gate arrays, complex programmable logic devices,
the tiny computing chips hidden inside everyday
objects. Right, the computers running your washing
machine or your microwave or the fuel injection
system in your car engine. Those chips don't
have keyboards attached to them. No, not at all.
They don't have screens. There is no console
to print to. So how do you know the chip is actually
processing your code? It's like trying to find
a pulse on a patient. You just need a sign of
life. So for these headless physical devices,
the Hello World equivalent is universally a blinking
LED, a single flashing light. It's so elegant.
It really is. Making a tiny LED blink on a circuit
board proves so much behind the scenes. It proves
that the code compiled correctly on your laptop.
It proves that the code successfully transferred
over the serial cable to the chip. It proves
that the chip's internal clock timings are accurate
and that the physical processor pins are firing
electrical current exactly when you tell them
to. It is the ultimate bare -metal sanity check.
The concept is so incredibly adaptable, and it
doesn't stop at physical hardware either. It
shifts visually as well. In the early days of
Java, Sun Microsystems created a Hello World
program based entirely on scalable vector graphics.
The Excel programming language introduces itself
to new developers with a spinning 3D computer
graphic of the Earth. And if you're learning
computer graphics libraries, you know, the tools
used to build modern video games, the equivalent
isn't text. It's rendering a simple, brightly
colored shape known as the Hello Triangle. So
what does this all mean? The phrase has morphed
from four character memory chunks in the 1970s
to blinking LEDs on a circuit board to spinning
3D globes. Educators Mark Gusdeel and Elliot
Soloway have actually argued that the traditional
text -based hello world test message might be
totally outdated today. Really? Yeah, they suggest
that manipulating complex graphics and sound
is now just as easy for modern computers as printing
text was decades ago. Why just print a word when
you can summon an entire interactive environment
with three lines of code. That raises an important
question though. If a modern language can render
a photorealistic 3D environment instantly, why
are we still asking it to print a 1950s radio
DJ catchphrase? Exactly, but it feels like we
would be losing a crucial piece of our shared
heritage if we let the text go completely. If
we synthesize everything we've looked at today,
Hello World is clearly far more than just a coding
cliche. It's a historical artifact inextricably
tied to the physical memory limitations of 1970s
hardware. Absolutely. It has evolved into a literal
industry benchmark for business usability with
the time to hello world metric. And it remains
a concept so fundamental that it seamlessly transforms
into factorial math, or blinking lights, or 3D
geometry depending entirely on the environment
it finds itself in. Oh, and before we wrap up,
I have to share one last detail that proves just
how deeply this specific idea of the sanity check
is embedded in computing culture. OK, let's hear
it. The Debian and Ubuntu Linux operating systems
literally include a command just called hello.
You type hello into your terminal, and the system
reaches out to its package manager. The GNU Hello
package downloads a tiny program and prints,
hello, world. Wait, a program built for no other
reason than to prove the downloading mechanism
itself is functioning. Yes. It exists solely
to prove the package manager is working correctly
and to serve as a pristine template for developers
learning how to format their own software packages.
It is sanity checks all the way down. An operating
system testing itself using the oldest grading
in the book. That is fantastic. It really makes
you think about the invisible layers of abstraction
we rely on every single day. As technology gets
more and more complex, we kind of lose sight
of the pipes and the wiring. And that leaves
us with a final thought to mull over. If we do
fully abandon the simple text, hello world, for
auto -generated code templates or instantly rendered
3D graphics, do we risk losing touch with the
absolute bare metal fundamentals of how humans
first learn to teach machines to speak? I want
to turn this toward you listening right now and
apply it to your own life. Oh, I like this. beyond
just computers, what is your personal hello world?
When you sit down to learn a completely new skill,
whether it's picking up a guitar, learning a
foreign language, or stepping onto a tennis court,
what is the simplest possible action you take?
What is that vital, tiny first step you use to
prove to yourself, okay, I am ready to begin.
Tapping the mic in your own life. I love that.
Well thank you for joining us on this deep dive
into the history, the friction, and the philosophy
behind two simple words. Keep exploring, keep
questioning, and we will catch you on the next
one.