2500 Ways to Say "Hello World"

Time-honored convention demands that the first thing a student of a new programming language learns is to write a command that makes the greeting "Hello World" appear on the computer screen. Bill Kinnersley of the University of Kansas has made a list of about 2500 programming languages, all of which were developed between about 1954 and right now. Does anyone remember Fortran, which is still being used?

Some of the programming and web scripting languages I have studied are: Basic, Visual Basic, Visual Basic.net, C++, JavaScript, PHP, CSS, XHTML, and XML. I should point out the only one of these languages I can claim real expertise in is XHTML. Currently I am studying the Ajax programming technique, which uses XHTML, JavaScript, PHP, and XML.

In some of the languages I have studied, "Hello World" is coded as:

C++

// Hello World in C++

#include

main()
{
cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
return 0;
}


BASIC

10 REM Hello World in BASIC
20 PRINT "Hello World!"


VisualBasic

REM Hello World in Visual Basic for Windows

VERSION 2.00
Begin Form Form1
Caption = "Form1"
ClientHeight = 6096
ClientLeft = 936
ClientTop = 1572
ClientWidth = 6468
Height = 6540
Left = 876
LinkTopic = "Form1"
ScaleHeight = 6096
ScaleWidth = 6468
Top = 1188
Width = 6588
Begin Label Label1
Caption = "Hello World!"
Height = 372
Left = 2760
TabIndex = 0
Top = 2880
Width = 972
End
End
Option Explicit


VisualBasic.NET

'Hello World in Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET)

Imports System.Console

Class HelloWorld

Public Shared Sub Main()
WriteLine("Hello, world!")
End Sub

End Class


PHP

// Hello World in PHP
echo 'Hello World!';
?>





At this very moment a sixteen-year-old in Boston, a computer scientist at Stanford, or a professor of HCI at RPI is sitting before a text editor writing the perfect computer language. When this language is published and adopted by programmers we will all realize that there will never be a need to develop another language. Don't count on it!! Someday I am sure there will be over 10,000 programming languages, none of which will serve every progammer and developer's needs.