etymology

My industry -programming- is fairly young and largely void of tradition. We don't get tatoos. There's no ceremony to be performed when you've written code on both sides of the equator. We don't smash champagne bottles on brand new database servers before plugging them into the rack.

That being said, one notable tradition stands out. This tradition dates back to the early 70's in a tutorial on the programming language B. When learning (or teaching) a new programming language, the first thing you do is write a small snippet of code that outputs a simple message to the screen. When you run your code and receive the message output to the screen, you know that the basic elements of the environment you're working in is setup correctly. You can then move on to more esoteric and frustrating problems to troubleshoot. The contents of that message is always the same:


hello world!