hello, world!

Traditionally, we should start with this famous phrase. But where did it come from?

Well, according to some resources, Officially, Brian Kernighan from Bell Labs was the first one to use “hello, world!” program in B language in his 1972 book “A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B”. However, there are some opinions that it was used even in the late 60s. Nerds can read more details in Wikipedia. The bottom line is that this tradition started more than 50 years ago!

But we are dealing with software and not philosophy here. Below I’ll follow the tradition and introduce the “hello, world!” program in 4 programming languages I’m familiar with:

• Python:

print('hello, world!')

• Java:

public class Main {
     public static void main(String[] args) {
         System.out.println("hello, world!");
     }
}

• JavaScript (lets assume we run it in Node):

console.log('hello, world!');

• Rust (we just met):

fn main() {
           println!("hello, world!");
 }

You may notice that the order is not coincidental – Python was published in the far 1991, Java in 1994, Javascript a year later and Rust in 2010.

There’s another good thing about this list – all of these 4 represent all possible types of languages – some of them are statically compiled, compiled during runtime (JIT), interpreted or utilizing all these methods. But more on that later.

Wew. A lot of words we have here. Who knew that “hello, world!” can be so long? And it’s not even assembly!