"Hello World!" ... one of the first programming scripts ... Why?

Hi, Actually it does have a historical background. When Kernigan and Ritchie were seeking a suitable language to design the UNIX operating system they could not find anything suitable for the task. They began writing a new language and hence was born C. Dennis Ritchie was supposed to have used 'hello world' as a test. Now whether that latter part is true I can't profess to know but one thing is for sure is that the first time it was introduced was in their famous book 'The C Programming Language' and the rest really is history! Regards.

It's just a simple statement which has gained popularity.

It was a polite way from a machine to enter the World for the first time, and it was the first time a "machine" "talked" to us.

its a little ironic

A "hello world" program has become the traditional first program that many people learn. In general, it is simple enough that people who have no previous experience with computer programming can easily understand it, especially with the guidance of a teacher or a written guide. Using this simple program as a basis, computer science principles or elements of a specific programming language can be explained to novice programmers. Experienced programmers learning new languages can also gain a lot of information about a given language's syntax and structure from a hello world program. So, if you cam learn it in computer language, you might see a similarity in another.

Simply put, the first order of business in dealing with a computer is communication. We have to know what the computer is doing as well as telling it what to do. Thus the first program gives us our first taste of computer output. Thus Hello World! has been adapted to most programming languages as a practical way to tell us how to get the computer to give us output.

It's typically used to demonstrate the basics of a programming language if the example actually prints out 'Hello World' to the screen, it effectively teaches the user how to print out strings for debugging, among other things.

Brian Kernighan, in an internal memo titled "Programming in C: A Tutorial" at Bell Laboratories, included it as an example program. It later appeared in the book, "The C Programming Language" written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

From wikipedia "A "hello world" program has become the traditional first program that many people learn. In general, it is simple enough that people who have no previous experience with computer programming can easily understand it, especially with the guidance of a teacher or a written guide. Using this simple program as a basis, computer science principles or elements of a specific programming language can be explained to novice programmers. Experienced programmers learning new languages can also gain a lot of information about a given language's syntax and structure from a hello world program."