Hello “Hello World” | Hacker News Reader

Hello “Hello World”

blog.jfo.click

60 pointshermanradtke9 comments

Sorry this is remotely tangentially related, but one of my favorite websites to peruse when bored is this hello world collection http://helloworldcollection.de/ You can really get a feel of a language's personality and style from its 'hello world'

It lists esoteric languages like Brainfuck, LOLCODE and Shakespeare for example, but misses on including languages like Hello and Hello++, which were made specifically for Hello World. Weird.

Looks like they accept contributions:

> To contribute, send your program to info@helloworldcollection.de.

The caveat is that they say they accept "real" languages only, with a link to the wikipedia page on Turing Completeness. I don't know anything about Hello/Hello++ and it's quite hard to search for without turning up dozens of "how to say Hello in N languages" pages, so I've no idea if it clears this bar.

There are a lot. My favorite in my short look: “ Hello World for standard pocket calculators (7-segment display). Type in and turn calculator upside down.

0.7734“

Interesting. While this website is well-promoted at Wikipedia "Hello World" articles, let me link

* https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Computer_Programming/Hello_wor...

* http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Hello_world

as two canonical example sites which also try to collect "Hello worlds" from as many programming languages as possible :-)

What impresses me with this article is how accurately the lack of substance of its title represents the lack of substance of the article itself.

This is a shockingly empty title. And the article follows suit. Some languages are more verbose than others. Those that are more verbose often don't need to be, unless when they do, then they do. Bummer. And if you zoom in on some function call then you see that a one-liner is hiding more complexity too. Who would have thought!

Such an immense waste of time that I have honestly no clue why the author went to lengths to write this all down.

Maybe this is a kind of promotion of zig? Not sure who jfo is, no about page and whois records are private. Anyways, it kind of worked, I didn’t know zig before and now I do.

I was also confused by the lack of focus on the article. It felt like it was an article of two halves:

1. An example of the how printing isn’t simple and how different languages hide that complexity in different places (though even there it gets weirdly hung up on the difference between “scripting” and systems languages despite the examples clearly showing the same kind of abstractions hiding the same kind of complexities)

2. A low level dive into the Zig programming language. This felt more like promo piece, which is perfectly fine, but where the article stated it’s not about Zig specifically is clearly a misrepresentation when more than 50% of the article specifically covered the Zig compiler.

I think this would have made more sense as two articles. One as a high level overview of how different languages handle builtins / core libraries like ‘println’, and another that is unashamedly a Zig promo piece (and there isn’t any shame in promo pieces here because languages that aren’t sponsored by big corps need such articles to garner developer interest).

It seems that the first "half" is just an introduction and setting of context for the second part. It worked out quite well for me, but I found the wording a bit too verbose and philosophical at times.

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