Hello World!

I would be stretching the truth if I claimed to remember the first program that I ever wrote.

I am quite sure that the year was 1975, and that I was in a computer lab at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I'd even be willing to wager that the programming language that I used was called "APL" and that I used something very much like a DECWriter II to input the program and to see the results when I ran the program... At that time CRTs were rare; Output was printed on that lovely green and white computer paper.

Most likely, the first program that I ever wrote was "Hello World!"... For some reason, the most common way of introducing a programming language back in the 70's was to show the instructions that were necessary to get the computer to output the text: "Hello World!". In my case, the output was printed, but whether printed or displayed on a screen it's pretty much the same... Some things seem to never change, as can be seen by the Richard Dooling's: Python on Windows XP: 7 Minutes To "Hello World!".

To be truthful, I'm not fully convinced that "Hello World!" really even qualifies as a program. True.. the programmer is giving the computer an instruction to perform, but it's not much of an instruction, and the "program" doesn't include any of the core factors that most real programs share.

Most "real" programs include the following:

• Data Input (get stuff into the program)
• Data Storage (keep stuff around for later)
• Data Access (get that stuff someone saved earlier)
• Data Manipulation (change that stuff in some way)
• Data Presentation (output the stuff)
• Computations (plug that stuff into formulas and see what happens)
• Flow Control (do different things based on the computations you ran on your stuff)

Of this list, "Hello World!" only makes a lukewarm attempt at "Data Presentation"... and the data is hard coded at that. Not an auspicious start... but I learned how to program anyway.

The best thing about "Hello World!" is that it is simple. In a few minutes, pretty much anyone can take the first step towards becomming a programmer... a person who writes instructions that tell a computer what to do.

Unfortunately, the later steps towards becoming a programmer aren't so easy. To become a "real" programmer requires a great deal of study... and once you do become a programmer you can never rest... the field is continually evolving and what is now cutting edge will likely soon be obsolete or extinct.

Continue learning new things, or you won't be a programmer for long.

Having said that... I would like to contradict myself:

There is a core to programming that never changes.
There are key concepts to master, and once those concepts are truly mastered the rest is just veneer.

I'll go even further and say that the key concepts of programming can be mastered by almost anyone if they are presented properly... and I would like to take a stab at doing just that (and I challenge my fellow programmers to do likewise)...

"Hello World!"