There is nothing more sacred to a coder than the phrase ‘Hello World’ (with the possible exception of ‘foo’ and ‘bar’ of course). It has become tradition that this phrase should be the first thing you see when you compile those very first lines of virgin code. It’s like mumbling ‘one-two, testing’ into a new microphone. It’s just what you do. ‘Hello World’ announces in a binary fanfare you have arrived, your right of passage complete.
Personally, I’ve always been creative. The first time I can remember being proud was for producing the epic “Viking ship versus giant octopus” aged four. I can even remember drawing every one of the suckers on the twisted triangles that passed for tentacles. At age six, I was sure I wanted to be a cartoonist. Cartoonists were creatives, creatives broke the rules and I liked that.
But I have a dirty secret. I like to code. I’ve always been a coder. The second time I can remember being proud was stood on tip-toes in front of Mrs. Rudge’s maths class at age eight, straining to hold aloft a dot-matrix list of squared numbers. I’d written it on my BBC Micro the evening before. I got a house point. Coding was easy. It had rules. Coders followed rules and I liked that.
I’ve had Creative Code Bipolar Disorder all my life. Left brain and right brain ebbing and flowing in perfect harmony. Except just occasionally, it happens. My brain fights. I can almost hear it, like in cartoons. And there is one phrase that makes it happen without fail… ‘Hello World’. My coder brain desperately wants to write it but my creative brain has NEVER let it happen. It’s my creative safety blanket reassuring me, reminding me I’m creative first, coder second.
I will never write it so long as my creative brain has a single synapse functioning. Never.
I use the phrase “hello there!” instead. It seems to do just fine.
And relax…
For what it’s worth… The first known instance of the usage of the words “hello” and “world” together in computer literature occurred earlier, in Kernighan’s 1972 Tutorial Introduction to the Language, with the following code:
main( ) {
extrn a, b, c;
putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';
