The Hamsterdome

BCPL

Martin Richards at Cambridge

Basic Combined Programming Language: a simplified version of an earlier language called CPL, designed so that its compilers could be small. It led straight to B, and from there to C.

BCPL

GET "LIBHDR"
LET START() BE WRITES("hello, world*N")

Inspired by: ALGOL 60

Inspired: B

B

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs

Thompson made B for the PDP-7 by simplifying BCPL until it fit in memory. The first known "hello, world" program comes from Brian Kernighan's 1972 tutorial for B, and this is it.

B, from Kernighan's 1972 tutorial

main( ) {
  extrn a, b, c;
  putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}

a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

Inspired by: BCPL

Inspired: C

In my museum: DEC PDP-7

C

Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs

Ritchie built C on the PDP-11 between 1972 and 1973 to write Unix programs, and in 1973 Unix itself was rewritten in it. It gives programmers direct access to the hardware and is still used for operating systems and tiny devices. (My terminal has a copy: try cat hello.c.)

C, from Kernighan and Ritchie's 1978 book

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

Inspired by: B, ALGOL 60

Inspired: Objective-C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Go

In my museum: DEC PDP-11, Unix V6

C++

Bjarne Stroustrup at Bell Labs

Started in 1979 as "C with Classes," adding Simula's objects to C. It's used for games, web browsers and other software that has to be fast.

C++

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::cout << "hello, world\n";
}

Inspired by: C, Simula 67

Inspired: Java, C#, Rust

Java

James Gosling at Sun Microsystems

Started in 1991 as Oak, named after a tree outside Gosling's office. Its promise was "write once, run anywhere": programs run on a virtual machine instead of directly on the hardware.

Java

public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("hello, world");
    }
}

Inspired by: C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk

Inspired: JavaScript, C#

In my museum: T-Mobile G1

C#

Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft

Microsoft's language for its .NET platform, with a lot in common with Java and C++.

C#

class Hello {
    static void Main() {
        System.Console.WriteLine("hello, world");
    }
}

Inspired by: Java, C++

Go

Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson at Google

Designed at Google in 2007 for Google's huge codebases and its networked machines with many processor cores, and released as open source in November 2009, along with its gopher mascot. Its designers, including Ken Thompson, who made B forty years earlier, were partly motivated by their shared dislike of C++. Google still develops it with community contributors, and it's used inside Google and in tools like Docker and Kubernetes.

Go

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("hello, world")
}

Inspired by: C, Pascal

Rust

Graydon Hoare at Mozilla

Hoare started it in 2006, and Rust 1.0 came out in May 2015. It catches many memory mistakes before a program ever runs, so code can be fast like C++ but safer.

Rust

fn main() {
    println!("hello, world");
}

Inspired by: C++, ML, Haskell