From C to ChatGPT: My Three-Decade Journey with ‘Hello World’

‘Hello World’: My Steady Anchor in a Sea of Changing Code

Author: Tom Campbell

I’m going to age myself with this short blog by discussing the simple concept of “Hello World”. Back in 1989, during my first computer science class, my awesome teacher introduced me to a basic C program: printf “Hello World” statement. That was the very first program I ever wrote, and from that moment, I was captivated! Ever since, whenever I’ve tackled a new programming language, I’ve always begun with that familiar greeting: “Hello World”. For instance, when I first began learning about Azure Functions and HTTP triggers (Side note: check out my blog post on Azure Functions!), I started in my typical fashion: with a straightforward function that responded with ‘Hello World’. These two simple words satisfy my need to know that I can build and run the code successfully. From that point complexity can certainly amplify, especially in today’s age of Google, Bing, & ChatGPT, however that unassuming statement always bolsters my confidence to learn any programming language.

Just to give you an idea of how many different Hello World programs I have written over the last 30+ years, here is my list:

• Basic
• C
• Assembler
• C++
• Ada
• Lisp
• VB
• Pascal
• Delphi
• C#
• JavaScript
• PHP
• Python
• Dart
• TypeScript

For fun, I asked ChatGPT to kick me out some samples of Hello World over last 30 years, enjoy:

The Early 90s: The Rise of Personal Computing – Hello World in C:

Late 90s to Early 2000s: The Web Revolution – Hello, World! in Java:

Mid-2000s: The Era of Mobile and Dynamic Web – Python

Early 2010s: The Age of Frameworks and Libraries – Node.js

Late 2010s to Early 2020s: The Era of Containers and Cloud – Rust

The Current Era: Beyond Traditional Computing

ChatGPT say hello world! 🙂