hello, world

December 27 2011


The creator of the C programming language, Dennis Ritchie, passed away earlier this Fall. His seminal work and textbook influenced many generations of programmers and technology enthusiasts. C, the programming language, has made possible many of the great computation machines/systems we now love (or hate). Just to put in perspective, we all program our Arduinos using C these days. There are a lot of underlying values and thoughts behind the creation of C, on the other hand it has its share of limitations and criticism. It was designed to be platform agnostic and valuable on a wide range of hardware, from embedded microcontrollers to supercomputers. To discover more about C, check out Ellen Ullman’s NYTimes article or the wikipedia entry.

“hello, world” was the output visible on a monitor if you followed the first example in the book “The C Programming Language” co-written by Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan. Over the years, it became the iconic first test program that you would write when you learn a new system or try out a new programming language.

So next time you tackle a new programming challenge, you can now pop a “hello world” program in there, knowing where it came from.

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