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hot take: "hello world" is stupid and overrated. "you should know how to print a message to console" is a good advice, but testing it with this one specific, semantically awkward string is pointless and built up too much.
EDIT some hours later:
this post was kind of needlessly hostile and i'm vaguely unsure how to feel about "actually getting attention and spread on cohost." probably will try to avoid putting out similar things going forward, but for now i am glad for the perspectives and information people have shared! having got some sleep between then and now, i'm more able to keep an open mind it feels like. see also follow-up here for some of my thought process and the recognition that it was kind of bent by my prior experiences
programming is in many ways comparable to wizardry, and would likely by regarded as much by most people before modern times, as well as many people today. we use knowledge gleaned from books which are seen as incomprehensible to most people to create fantastical enchantments which project our faces and voices to other people across thousands of miles
those who practice wizardry ought to embrace the associated trappings
(yes i get that ppl worry that this sort of metaphor may contribute to the perceived inaccessibility of technical knowledge—and, it still is descriptive of the current state of affairs. plus imo it adds to the appeal which might draw ppl to learn more about it)
See, the thing about Hello World per se is that this is true and the exercise of "make a new language/new library/new system/whatever do A Very Recognizable Thing" is extremely welcoming and comforting. It's the entry-level version of porting Doom or Bad Apple!! to a new platform; for experienced people it's ritual, for people who are less experienced it's a good reminder that none of this stuff is hostile to you, you can make it do what you want. Especially in an era where more and more capitalists are trying to turn our computers into hostile architecture, this seems important.
Also, some of us older heads have worked with systems in the past where just getting it to say "Hello world!" was a challenge or even impossible outright. Try getting that out of older IBM Fortrans formatted like that...
