Hello, World!

In 2006, a programmer climbed twenty-one flights of stairs because his elevator's software had crashed-again. By the time he reached his apartment, he'd decided to build a language that would make those bugs impossible. The White House ended up recommending it by name.

In 1964, two Dartmouth professors typed RUN at 4 AM and launched the personal computer revolution. In 1952, Grace Hopper built the first compiler, and nobody believed her. In 1995, Brendan Eich created JavaScript in ten days and accidentally became the most-used language on Earth.

Every one of these stories starts the same way: with someone typing a few lines and watching the screen print "Hello, World!"-two words that trace back to Brian Kernighan's 1978 C Programming Language, and before that, to a Bell Labs memo he wrote in 1974. It became the universal first program, the one thing every language has in common.

Hello, World! collects those moments-90 programming languages, 76 years, from 1948 to 2024. Each language gets one page: who made it, why, what the code looks like, and what happened next. Dip in anywhere or read it front to back and watch the entire history of programming unfold.

What's inside

• 90 languages across 8 eras-from Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül to languages released in 2024
• 7 spotlight stories you won't forget: the elevator that inspired Rust, the 4 AM birth of BASIC, Grace Hopper's compiler that shouldn't have worked, JavaScript's ten-day sprint, the COBOL code that outlived everything, and more
• Verified Hello World code for every language-checked against official documentation
• Fun facts that land: the White House memo that named Rust, the LOLCODE web server that actually worked, the language built entirely from eight characters

You'll like this book if you've ever...

• Wondered why there are so many programming languages-and whether anyone actually planned it this way
• Used a language for years without knowing the argument, accident, or bet that created it
• Wanted a book about programming that reads like stories, not documentation

No coding experience required. No coding experience hurt, either.