Meaning
I've been thinking about this for a while now - what is the lesson behind the "Hello World" program, and what does it tell us, to the extent that it can, about the language we're about to use?
If you go to wikipedia you'll find that:
A "Hello, World!" program is generally a simple computer program which outputs (or displays) to the screen (often the console) a message similar to "Hello, World!" while ignoring any user input. A small piece of code in most general-purpose programming languages, this program is used to illustrate a language's basic syntax. A "Hello, World!" program is often the first written by a student of a new programming language,[1] but such a program can also be used as a sanity check to ensure that the computer software intended to compile or run source code is correctly installed, and that its operator understands how to use it.
Let's break that down a bit: dunno
Intro
Before we dive into this let's take a step back and look
Small Learnings
This is a post about the meaning of "Hello World" as to what it means to be a developer.
Story Time
I've put the following at the end as it's more personal - maybe it will cheer up some kiddo
Contrary to many beliefs not all that end up being developers start their journey with a "Hello World" program. In fact, I, for one avoided programming like the plague for the longest time. Not because I didn't like it, but because I was afraid I wouldn't understand it. I eventually approached it from the world of matlab because I had to compute fast fourier transforms, process images - well matrices - pixel by pixel using nested for loops. At the time the term quadratic was associated in my mind with the power of a signal, rather than the time complexity of an algorithm. Anyway - I made a lot of very cool projects in matlab, eventually got my masters in Electrical Engineering. At the time I was happy with matlab - my biggest pain was that it was slow. Which is to say matlab can't be fast - it was also a skill issue on my part.
I then moved on to my PhD, where I had to do a lot of simulations and matlab just wasn't cutting it so I moved to python - numpy and scipy were my friends. During this time I also had my first contact with java - building and maintaining desktop applications for medical researchers and technicians. Let me tell you two things about this - Swing is a pain in the ass and I have never written so much spaghetti code in my life - but it worked - it provided value to others. Again - not java's fault - skill issue.
Afterward I manage to land my first job, where I still am today, and boy oh boy did things accelerate. Its already been 8 years at the moment of writing this. It was a spectacular journey and still is - I joined adswizz when it was in the late start-up stages - I think 3 years before we got aquired by pandora and boy was it fun: hacking things into reality, learning about cloud infrastructure, shipping at crazy speed, pushing directly to production... you get the idea.
Priorities shifted after we got acquired to supporting a larger scale. Things normalised and slowed down a bit - but for the best.