Hello, World! — contingence?

Anything must start with a good’ol “Hello, World!” isn’t it?

I was wondering: what was the original “Hello World” motto”. Was there a comma, an exclamation point? Nothing?

According to the dedicated Wikipedia article, we might have information about this. Quite unsurprinsingly, it was mostly popularize with an excerpt of C code in The C Programming Language by K&R (inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan):

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

To be fair however, the very first “Hello World” seems to have been written in BCPL, an early programming language and precursor of C.

This expression have a special place for me, and surely enough I’m not the only one. I believe that it is linked to something I haven’t found a word yet, but I like to call it with a word that has a related meaning in French: contingence. I believe that the word also exists in English with roughly the same meaning.

I’ll be happy to write an article about this but for now I’ll summarize it as follows: the possibility for something to exist – or not – and, by extension, the conscious warming feeling of thinking about what could emerge.

In the sense that I understand it, it’s intimately linked to learning, and all the more so when it’s a first learning experience. The familiar example of computing is particularly telling. I remember my first lines of code as something exhilarating, especially as it really opens up a world. An opening onto the world through what you can then understand, the files you can open and modify. But also, and this is the heart of it, an opening onto oneself, onto the horizon of possibilities that programming allows. A first program, a first tool, a first game.

With a simple succession of keystrokes, anything is possible. Entire worlds become craftable, like a writer who has been given the right to draw, paint and add music to his work, and above all, of course, to let the subject, the new reader, touch it too, to make it his own, right into his hands, right into his fingers, right back here again.

Every time I try something new with my computer, being a framework or a language, bringing these two words of “hello world” only opens new doors for me to muse about what can be done with it – and most of the time, it involves video games :)

Alexandre