By this stupid metric, PHP is the greatest programming language ever made.
12 byte Hello World must mean that it's also the ideal solution for every other programming problem, right?
There was another comment about how this will be the next "Fibonacci debacle", related to how Ted Dzubia trolled the node.js crowd by pointing out it's weakness for CPU-intensive tasks, then had a ton of people wasting time on writing faster Fibonacci algorithms in node just to prove him wrong.
My point was that comparing languages by the size of their Hello World programs is a useless exercise.
Second, there is no point in using it for that when you have bash ... because bash has echo built-in and bash is a programming language:
$ echo "Hello World!"
1 line bitches! I can feel my unix beard growing ...