‘Hello World’ is in the news once again. Bill Gates recently joined Twitter and chose this to be his first message to the community. For the uninitiated, this message was popularized by the book “The C Programming Language” where the first program to be taught to the readers by authors Kernighan and Ritchie printed these words on the screen.
Above you can see one such program in action, written by the undersigned in Java. This also happens to be the first class packaged under the URL of this blog: Java code authors conventionally package their code under the name of their website, to prevent a clash with a class of the same name written by someone else.
My musing is, why did he choose something from the C language, where as BASIC happens to be his love? I sent him a direct message asking him what ‘gw’ in ‘gwbasic’ stood for – some readers would be aware that there was controversy around this with many believing it stood for “Gates, William” but there being no confirmation. Let there be light.
