What is the significance of the phrase “hello world”, in teaching about computers/coding languages?
I’ve seen it used several times.
The earliest reference I could find was when Martin Richards wrote the first “hello, world” program in his new BCPL programming language in 1967. It apparently caught on after Richard Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie used it as a programming example in their popular “The C Programming Language” book.
Yeah, it’s pretty much become the standard as the simplest program imaginable. All it does is print ``hello world’’ to the screen. So it’s used to show what all the bits and pieces (headers and such) a programming language needs, before you get into the nitty gritty of the language’s syntax for actually doing stuff.
I imagine it has the same significance as “foo” and “bar”.