From LQWiki

Hello World is any of the minimal programs that emit this message (a representative sample in various languages can be found at http://www.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/ ). The purpose of the program is to print "Hello, World!" to the standard output, and it is generally the first program a programming student learns. The tradition comes from the C programming language, and it is the first example program in K&R. If you can get a hello world program to run, you know at least that you have the programming tools properly installed and can move on from there.

Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a hairy compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to lose.

Examples

• Hello World in C
• Hello World in C++
• Hello World in PHP

See also

• Hello sailor!

This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.