It is customary for coders, when they write their first program in some new language or in a new environment, to start with the simplest possible code that will print “Hello world!” to the screen (or any other output attached to the system, like a printer or a networked machine).
This seems like a funny way to signal the birth of a new “entity”, still unshaped, that greets the world before slowly evolving to whatever it’s going to become. As if the machine transcends from a bunch of circuits and switches to something that “talks”.
Despite being anthropomorphic, this initiation differs from the first messages that were ever transmitted between humans, via new mediums. There is no machine that talks there, it’s people that communicate, so they might say whatever comes to mind for the occasion:
- First text message (SMS) ever sent (1992): “merry Christmas”
- First e-mail message ever sent (1971): -nobody remembers that-
- First wireless telegram message ever sent (1897): “Are you ready”
- First morse code message ever sent over wire (1844): “What hath God wrought?”
However, I’m a coder at heart, so it makes perfect sense to me, to start this blog with the same simple greeting that I would use in a program.
And then, move on with writing more lines, tinkering with many different things, trying to find how they work, how to make them work better (or just differently), testing new things, sometimes useful (but often just for fun), failing too many times before finally succeeding in putting down some thoughts and ideas that may be worthy of living here in the open, outside of a hidden, late night lab.
