Hello, World!

First

As someone whose first introduction to programming was a Hello World script on a BASIC Stamp circa 2009, I always feel the urge to write some form of Hello World on every new platform or language I pick up, almost as a good luck ritual. Something about knowing that my program can greet me makes me feel a little better – almost as if I have the grace of the gods to proceed on my perilous journey.

As to the phrase “Hello, World!” itself: in its original form, the clause was all lowercase, no exclamation point, with the two words separated by a single comma and space. The importance of this comma is sometimes contested, and these days many programmers opt to exclude it. The use of the phrase “Hello, World!” was popularized by the widely renowned book The C Programming Language:

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages:

Print the words
hello, world

This is a big hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy.

Kernighan and Ritchie, The C Programming Language

Second

I’m not quite sure how accurate that last statement is. I don’t exactly consider the book light reading for someone who has never coded before. However, after learning C once and then coming back to this book, I can see why it is the reference on C.

As for the sub-title text, that’s a humorous reference to the Unix Epoch time, which is essentially when time began for Unix computers. Unix Epoch time is recorded as seconds since 12:00 AM January 1^st, 1970. Since that time is in UTC, the equivalent time in the US would be December 31^st, 1969 7:00 PM, which, if a programmer misinterprets time strings, will likely cause this date to rear its end. Epic problems caused by Epoch problems.