Developers always think about how to make coding easier, and by extension, always wonder, “Is another language easier to program in?”
Fortunately, a really cool website has “Hello World” in nearly every programming language you can think of… I had posted a few excepts here, with some comments on them.
10 REM Hello World in BASIC
20 PRINT “Hello World!”
Everybody learns BASIC in High School. My favorite thing to do was to write a snippet that would take my name and make it move across the screen. That, and a lottery simulator (you pick six numbers and how many tries before you win) were my claims to fame in BASIC.
C Hello World in Fortran
PROGRAM HELLO
WRITE (*,100)
STOP
100 FORMAT (‘ Hello World! ‘ /)
END
I am old enough to have studied FORTRAN in school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth with their mighty TRS-80s. Interestingly, I saved my FORTRAN code onto a punch cards.
{Hello World in Pascal}
program HelloWorld(output);
begin
WriteLn(’Hello World!’);
end.
Pascal was another language that I studied both in School and later on my own when I wanted to write for the Macintosh. When I was switching from OS 9 to OS X, Apple used to have all their documentation using Pascal code examples….
// Hello World in C++ (pre-ISO)
#include <iostream.h>
main()
{
cout << “Hello World!” << endl;
return 0;
}
I learned C++ reading Dave Mark’s book on “C++ for the Macintosh”. It’s still a bread and butter language for many people. I haven’t written a line of C++ in years.
– Hello World in HyperTalk
answer “Hello, world!”
HyperTalk was my FIRST real object oriented programming language. Oddly enough, I have come back to it as I am writing SenseTalk scripts for testing.
// Hello World in Java
class HelloWorld {
static public void main( String args[] ) {
System.out.println( “Hello World!” );
}
}
Java never caught fire for me, because it seemed EVERYBODY was doing to Java, so I figured, “Why bother?”. I made some Java applets, embedded them in webpages, or made navigation applets, but you do all that stuff faster, smarter, cheaper with other programming languages.
<?php
// Hello World in PHP
echo ‘Hello World!’;
?>
PHP is a great language for writing FAST and SIMPLE website stuff. It’s easy to read, but I find that larger projects (Wordpress and Zenphoto) get very difficult to maintain.
// Hello World in Cocoa Obj-C (OS X)
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
NSLog(@”Hello, World!”);
[pool release];
return 0;
}
Cocoa, which is really Objective-C, is not a new language from Apple… it’s been around since the days of NeXT (which is why the classes are called NSClass). I was writing some Objective C when I was in college on a NeXT machine and later, I took Aaron Hillegasses great class on Cocoa. I wish I wrote more Cocoa code, but my life is all testing and process stuff now.

# Hello World in Ruby
puts “Hello World!”
Ruby is my new love. Sweet and simple, she just seems to get the job done. Easy to maintain, when she goes bad, she clearly tells you what went wrong for easy debugging.
Some other computer languages I have never studied, and probably never will because Ruby does what they do quite nicely.
# Hello world in perl
print “Hello World!\n”;
Perl. Ok. I know squat about it. Looks simple enough tho…
# Hello World in Python
print “Hello World”
Python. Some people at my job like Python. I can’t see the appeal of a language that will throw an error if you have a space in the wrong place, but I am just one guy.