The Origins of "Hello, World"

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Where did "Hello World" come from and why did it  catch on? The first part I have vague memories and the second part I have no idea at all. My  memory of it is a cartoon or something like that, that showed a chick coming out of an egg and  the caption was hello world. That's my memory, but I've told this story enough times that  it probably is at this point a hallucination.

[00:00:23]I simply don't know. Uh but that's the idea. And  so you can use something like that as the first example in a programming language because if you  can print hello world then you're over some hurdle and then the rest of it is filling in more  and more details to get the program to do something more interesting. So that's my memory  of it. Is that the real origin or did I get that from somebody else? So Martin Richard, creator  of BCPL, had somewhere or other done a "Hello, World" kind of thing himself and he and I traded  mail about it once or something and he quite graciously said, "No, no, I think you did it  first." Or words to that effect, I honestly don't know. But if somebody said, "No, no,  here's Martin Richard's." I would say, "Great."

[00:01:08]It is now so standard because an awful lot of  people who learned programming back in the day, started with the C book or at least that was  their first introduction to C for sure. And so yes, "Hello World" was a  good example because of that.