Many newbie programmers ask themselves the same question: who first came up with the idea of “Hello World”? The origin of this tradition goes back to the years 1972 and 1974, when Brian Kernighan, a Canadian computer scientist and co-developer of the B and C programming languages, wrote the internal manuals for both languages. According to his own words, he wanted to show how to arrange individual words in a meaningful way with each of the B and C languages. The famous welcome word was inspired by a cartoon previously seen on television.
This is the famous Bell Laboratories manual “The C Programming Language”, written by Kernighan in collaboration with the American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, which allowed the now familiar expression to become a standard. The first book published on the C programming language, it quickly gained such notoriety that it is now considered a reference work. In Kernighan’s internal instructions as in “The C Programming Language”, the text was still written “hello, world”. It was only later that it took root in the programming community in the forms “Hello, World!” “, “Hello World” or, in French, “Bonjour le monde! “.
