Many people who are programming “Hello, World!” for the first time will wonder who came up with the idea in the first place? The origin of the tradition dates back to 1972 and 1974. Brian Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist and co-developer of the B and C programming languages and wrote the internal manuals for B and C. His aim was show how individual words could be arranged in a meaningful way using the B and C code languages. The inspiration for the famous greeting is said to he come from a cartoon Kernighan had seen on television.
The “breakthrough” of the familiar word came with the famous Bell Laboratories textbook “The C Programming Language”, which Kernighan wrote with the American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie. This was the first book published on the C programming language. It quickly achieved fame and is now considered a standard work. The text was written as “hello, world” in Kernighan’s internal instructions and in “The C Programming Language”. It subsequently became known as “Hello, World!” or “Hello World” in the programming community.