Though I have used the phrase to greet as a welcome to my personal website, I’m absolutely sure you have come across this phrase before, either in the code for programmers or the internet for the none programmers.

But where does it come from? Today I would like to shade some light about this popular two words sentence, the Hello world!

The history

According to Wikipedia, the phrase was first used recently in 1967 in the BCPL programming language as is claimed by Jargon File. Click here to read the Hello world history on Wikipedia. When programmable computers were invented it gave programmers the opportunity to code and print outcomes on the user’s screen. Thus Hello world! got the chance.

Usage

Hello world! Is often used by programmers especially in the early stages of learning a programming language and to test the programming language’s ability to handle sentences technically known as strings. See examples below.

Shell programming.

#!bin/bash
echo "Hello world!"

C programming

main( ) {
 printf("Hello world!");
}

Most programming languages which have the capability of showing characters on the screen, often use the code which introduces printing. So that the programmer can test their ability to use a particular programming language to print a message on the terminal(command line or cmd or console) or other user interfaces.

However the phrase is not exclusive to programming/coding alone, everyone can use it.