The 'Hello, World'

The "Hello, world" is a simple program that only prints "Hello, world" to the screen. It's useful when starting to use a new development tool or a new programming language because it allows to see if everything is working right.

The original "Hello, world" is from The C Programming Language book from 1978. The book is also called "K&R", because it's authors are Brian Wilson Kernighan and Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. They both worked at Bell Labs. They also created UNIX.

It's said[^1] that Kernighan wrote first "Hello, world" program for BCPL documentation. I couldn't find anything in "The BCPL Reference Manual"[^2]. But I was able to find a tutorial by Kernighan, written in 1974 (four years before K&R), which includes following lines[^3]:

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

[^1]: Stackoverflow question about Hello World origins [^2]: The BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) Reference (PDF) [^3]: Brian W. Kernighan's C programming tutorial from 1974