A “Hello, World!” program is generally a simple computer program that emits (or displays) to the screen (often the console) a message similar to “Hello, World!”. A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language’s basic syntax. A “Hello, World!” program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language,[1] but such a program can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.
History
While small test programs have existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition of using the phrase “Hello, World!” as a test message was influenced by an example program in the 1978 book The C Programming Language,[2] with likely earlier use in BCPL. The example program from the book prints “hello, world”, and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial:[3]
main( ) {
printf("hello, world");
}