Hello World , my first post

"Hello World !"

This is the title of the default WordPress blog post ( where i had first created this blog) and underneath is the helpful suggestion that one should edit or delete it and get on to more serious posting.

But like most of my writing , this post was influenced by what i like to call a ” thought connection"  – you’re thinking of something else and suddenly some event or , as in this case , some random text connects the thoughts .

It was because I was recently writing an article on Dennis M. Ritchie , who passed away last month, that I instantly made this connection.

“Hello World ” , the message that is so common place now that we don’t even notice it forms the basis of every beginner coding class.

Computer students the world over , no matter what language they are learning are made to display this message on their screens as their very first coding assignment.Programming language books , any and all of them start their coding examples ( or assignments ) with the “Hello World Program” as its Wikipedia entry terms it.

This , rather plain looking, message that actually is part of coding legend was first used in The C Programming Language , by Dennis M. Ritchie and Brian Kernighan , commonly accepted as the coding bible to thousands of developers the world over.

The actual credit for it goes to Brian Kernighan who in an internal memorandum at 1974 Bell Laboratories used the following code snippet :

main()
 {
        printf("hello, world\n");
 }

This snippet essentially prints the now-so-common “Hello World” message on the computer screen and is the first program any beginner is taught.

Hello world message output of a C program

Another point of interest i found was that this display message is also used by computer hackers to prove that they have hacked into a system and can execute arbitrary code on it.

More on Dennis Ritchie in a separate article I’ll publish soon.