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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

The reason that "Hello, World" is a C thing is that C is the source of the tradition around that phrase. In Kernighan and Richie's "The C Programming Language" printing "Hello, World" is the very first exercise.

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It's actually a B thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27048024

Interestingly enough, in the linked text, B is referred as a "language", follow by "the generated code is quite good", presumably referring to the resulting Assembly code.

I disagree as that doesn’t introduce using the B environment with a Hello, world program which is the whole point. After K&R it was the canonical first program.

Pulling my copy of K&R from the shelf, it introduces the hello world program with

  The first program to write is the same for all languages:
    Print the words   
    hello, world

Suggesting that this was already an established tradition when the book was written in 1978

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