Hello, World!
A Brief History of Programming in 90 Languages
What was your first language?
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90 languages.
76 years.
One line of code.
From Plankalkül in 1948 to Gleam in 2024, every programming language has its own story—a moment of invention, a problem it was born to solve, a generation of programmers it shaped. Hello, World! tells all 90 of them, one "Hello, World!" at a time.
Eight Stories
The history behind the languages
The Day Hello World Was Born
In 1974, Brian Kernighan wrote a Bell Labs tutorial on C and opened with 'Hello, World!' as his very first example. He wasn't starting a tradition — he was just writing a tutorial. But every programmer who has written their first line of code since has repeated him.
Read in the book →The Woman Who Made Computers Speak English
In the 1950s, Grace Hopper believed computers should understand instructions written in plain English, not raw machine numbers. Nobody thought it was possible, so she built the compiler herself. The thing she was told couldn't exist has never stopped running.
Read in the book →4 AM in College Hall
In 1964, two Dartmouth professors made a radical bet: that ordinary people — not just trained mathematicians — could learn to program. They called their language BASIC, and stayed up all night to launch it. By 4am they had proof it worked. Two decades later, it was the first language Bill Gates ever sold and the one Jobs learned from a book.
Read in the book →The Impossible Program
In 1998, Ben Olmstead designed a programming language specifically to be unusable — and named it after the eighth circle of Hell. He couldn't write Hello World in it himself. Two years passed before anyone could, and when it finally happened, a computer had to solve what no human brain was capable of.
Read in the book →JavaScript in 10 Days
In May 1995, Brendan Eich was given ten days to build a programming language for Netscape's browser. The deadline was non-negotiable and the result was imperfect, bizarre, and completely inescapable. Over thirty years later, you almost certainly ran some of it today.
Read in the book →The Graphics Card That Ate the World
NVIDIA built CUDA to let scientists program graphics cards. Everyone assumed it was a niche research tool. Then deep learning turned out to run fastest on exactly the hardware NVIDIA made for video games — and overnight, the company that rendered explosions became the foundation of artificial intelligence.
Read in the book →Twenty-One Floors
In 2006, Graydon Hoare climbed twenty-one flights of stairs because the elevator in his building had crashed — again. By the time he reached his apartment, he was designing a new programming language built to make that kind of failure impossible. The White House would eventually tell the rest of the software industry to follow his lead.
Read in the book →Call of Duty: COBOL
In April 2020, New Jersey's unemployment system collapsed under pandemic claims, and the governor held a press conference asking for emergency help from anyone who knew the language. He called it 'Cobalt.' He meant COBOL — written in 1959, quietly processing trillions of dollars in transactions every day, and suddenly the most urgently in-demand programming skill in America.
Read in the book →