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Comment by codeTired | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a finished software once. It printed “hello world” to the console.

Are you sure it is linked against the latest glibc?

Also, how do you handle locales - "Bonjour le monde" and "Hola Mundo" should be table stakes for an actually finished hello world program.

Are you sure it's finished? Did it handle the case where the output stream couldn't be written to, for example?

Likely no, just like any other software ever written.

That's outside of scope. Most programs should fail when faced with situations outside their purview.

Yes, but if you don't check the printf return code (in C, say) the program won't fail. It'll return 0 (i.e. report success) but it did not do what it promised to do on the tin. If you only check its non-negativity, you might only have written "Hell" and again the program merrily carries on and says "all OK: 0!"

Unless you wrote it in HQ9+ [1], I wouldn't be so sure that it's finished.

If you wrote it in C, I wouldn't be surprised that in a few years time you'd have to check a few security policies before you can actually write to the stdout file descriptor. And in JavaScript, the top level "console" object will probably be removed to avoid possible namespace clashes.

[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/HQ9%2B

Did it compile to wasm and run at the edge at scale?

but didn't you feel the urge to give an option specifying which font to use?

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