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! « .
