A better Hello World

23 July 2016 - less than 1 min read time
Tags: Software Development

The “Hello world” program is usually the first introduction to any programming language. It looks like this in the C programming language:

/* hello.c */
#import <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  printf("Hello, world!");
  return 0;
}

It demonstrates the minimum amount you need to write a C program. In more modern languages however, this example isn’t as useful anymore. Here’s the same example in Python:

# hello.py
print "Hello, world!"

A better hello world

In today’s world of more succint programming languages, we need a different “hello world” to demonstrate language features better. Here’s what I propose:

// hello.js
function getGreeting (name) {
  return `Hello, ${name}!`
}

const message = getGreeting('world')
console.log(message)

This simple example demonstrates a few more things than printing strings:

How to write a function with an argument
Returning values from functions
How to use variables
The naming convention for functions (camelCase versus snake_case)
String concatenation
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