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A Hello World prompt? Never done one. It's not a prompt.

I wrote my first Hello World application 28 years ago. I don't expect Slashdot to teach me. I don't expect Slashdot to teach anybody.

I do expect Slashdot to link to Hello World in 441 different languages. Here, have a peek: http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm

Notice the difference. You're expecting Slashdot to treat you like an idiot. I'm assuming the reader is familiar with Hello World and drawing their attention to something fun that a number of other people have put together, that's also educational, that they might enjoy contributing to.

Is that being superior? Really?

In another instance,

Nicholas Harbour, who at the time was working for the Department of Defense Computer Forensics Lab (DCFL)

wrote a loving modified dd that writes to multiple files and streams to multiple programs at the same time. The program, dcfldd, also introduces the sorely missed VERIFY operation, and even block-by-block hashes, ( dcfldd Man page)

Maybe someone will combine this with dd_rescue, ddrescue and dd_rhelp to make the ultimate "Convert and Copy" utility :-)

Ah and I can dream of SCTP support too :-)

Lua's is:
print "Hello world"

Not all languages are more verbose than the old classics. Though for a laugh, look a "C++-Epoc". I can't believe they actually expected anyone to program like that :P

Oh, and the link should be: http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm (no slash on the end).

*&^*(%(&*)!!!!! -- pressed "submit" before making my point... Hello World is not getting simpler over time, it's getting more complicated. Compare it in Fortran vs. PHP or BASIC vs. Java at http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm/ (hello world in 421 languages).

COBOL is not significantly easier to learn than most languages. Take a look at the hello world collection and tell me COBOL is easier to write hello world than any other.

Python is a one liner. As are many other languages. Even Java with its "horribly difficult to understand" OOP syntax (?!?!?) is less lines than COBOL.

I'm not saying COBOL is hard to understand or learn, but neither is it easier. Other languages have the same useful capabilities as COBOL, with powerful standard libraries making modern programming easier.

I tried to find the page that I originally read about UNIX acronyms, but couldn't. I found this one, though: http://roesler-ac.de/wolfram/acro/credits.htm

It has multiple possibilities for dd: "copy and convert" "dataset definition" and device, disk, and dump in various combinations. The answer isn't as clear as either of us thought.

Life-long tools I got in elementary school: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

Subjects where either the tools changed or my understanding of it was fundamentally altered by later education: Science, sociology, history, and everything else. And the "life-long" tools were built upon as well, of course.

The purpose of most of your education isn't to prepare you for the rest of your life, it's to prepare you for the next step in your education. What a child is taught of gravity in first grade is so greatly simplified it bears little resemblance to what they'll be taught when they're a grad student in a physics department. But without that initial simplification, they won't be able to acquire all the intervening steps of understanding to get there.

Tools are much the same. You could start a child in a career for art by inundating them with all sorts of artistic theories and art history, and information on what all the different types of media and canvas are, all at once. Or you could hand them some crayons and let them have at it, and gradually introduce those concepts. The second method works, if the kid has artistic inclinations. The first method leaves you with a kid who is bored, confused, and would like very much to do something, please.

You're right; LOGO, at least as presented to grade school children, is not a viable adult language. But C++ is not a viable grade schooler language. Even the simplest C++ program, "Hello World", involves several commands, keywords and symbols that are unintuitive to a child. "Cout" is easily explained, and "main" only slightly less so, but "#include", "<iostream.h>", "return", and "<<" are all rather more esoteric. So the child either needs some pretty complex concepts (for a grade schooler) such as standard libraries, buffers, etc., explained to them, or they need to take it on faith that these lines which don't have a visible effect are important. The first, as noted above, leads to the child becoming bored and confused, and as for the second, children frequently refuse to take things on faith. The simplest LOGO program is "FORWARD 10" (or the equivalent). It says exactly what it does: "Move forward 10 paces". (I said "paces" instead of "pixels" because the child doesn't even need to understand, at this point, what the unit of measurement is.) They can string several such commands together, and each has a visible effect. Kids need a clear connection between what they do and what the effect is. LOGO provides that, C++ does not. BASIC straddles the line somewhat between adult languages and child languages, which makes it a good language for teenagers or advanced children.

Are there better programming languages for grade school children to learn today? Possibly so. Were there back when I was a kid? Not that I've heard of.

It is only 4 letters. Has anyone thought that perhaps DNA code is actually similar to Brainfuck? Here is the Hello World program in Brainfuck.

Brainfuck has six commands: '+', '-', '[', '.', '>', and '<' while DNA only has four codes. Perhaps '+', '-', '[', '.', '>', and '<' can be coded as aa, gg, cc, tt, ag, and ac. Then the code would be:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaccagaaaaaaaa
aaaaaaagaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaagaa
aaaaagaaacacacac ggccagaaaattagaa
ttaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ttttaaaaaattagaa
aattacacaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
aaaaaattagttaaaa aattgggggggggggg
ttgggggggggggggg ggttagaattagtt

Also check out 99 bottles of beer and Hello World Collection.

You have only to look at http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm
to see that development on Symbian is insanely complex and you'd have to be out of your gourd to do it voluntarily. The development environment only runs well on Windows. Last time I looked, Wine was required in order to run it on Linux because there were some proprietary tools in the compilation chain. There is no good debugger support.

There are, however, reasonable POSIX compatibility libraries; Java is implemented using them.
Even in Java, many programs run flawlessly in the emulated environment and die silently on the hardware. On-device debugging is supposed to be available for Java but I was never able to get it to work. Nokia would do well to consider other operating systems.

I believe that 'dd' comes from OS/360 JCL's DD statement - see this page. There are some other pages that say the same thing.

Here you go, smart ass (you really should know better than to put an obvious challenge up like that on /.)

Some Quick Finds from Google:

Your hello world:

http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm

And Another with MVS JCL:

http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/asm370.html

And Some Miscellaneous Links for Main frame coding:

http://search390.techtarget.com/home/0,289692,sid1 0,00.html (Looks to be s/390 specific articles).

http://www.texasrock.com/ (Nice collection of links)

College is fine and dandy, but that's not the only way to learn something.

My advice is to make the effort and go to H2K2 and get a real sample. I think you will find like I did when I spoke at H2K, that the majority are well informed about our history.

Like any culture, our culture needs to be taught! Only so many can have had first hand experience and there are less of us each day. Yet, each day, there are more just coming into interest who need to be taught. If you find such a teacherless group of people interested in computers, you should take it upon yourself to teach who we are.

Show people the first computer you ever programmed. Show them the games you played and wrote. Show them how to say "Hello World!" directly with a Turing Machine or in Java and everything between.

Tell them about Norbert Wiener and Marie Ampere. Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and David Levy (yes Ken Thompson too and Belle). Scott Adams(all three) and Stanislaw Lem. Joeseph Weizenbaum and Eliza, Alaxander Bain and Donald Hebb. Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney and Larry Bryan. Alan Kay and Steve Russell. David Gottieb, Joel Hochberg and Al Arcorn. Thomas Hobbes and Levithan. Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Huxley. Aristotle and Lucretius. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage and Blaise Pascal. B. F. Skinner and Wilhelm Wundt. Robert Tinney and Peter Max. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. Doug Lenat, Push Singh and myself.

We will always need more teachers who know how to both show and to tell!