Alex Parra

Hello World

April 27, 2010 by Alex Parra

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
    <title>Hello World! (Pre-HTML5)</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello World! Welcome to My Website</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Hello World! Basic HTML Page (Pre-HTML5)

Hello! World?
This is the very first post in (on? it's on right?) this "blog". It's quite possibly also the last... who knows? I've never been a prolific writer but time and time again I've regretted not having written something: Where the heck did I read that?! Should have written it on my own blog! So this is an effort to get the ball rolling. Shut up GPT, I'm doing the writing here...

I think it's more of a desire to express myself by making (not just writing) it. Which platform are you using Alex? Evidently, being a software engineer, I had to go and reinvent the wheel, so it's a raw Next.js instead of whatever fancy CMS is en vogue these days. Where's the fun in that? And have you read the WordPress/WPEngine drama?

So here it is. A blog. And this bland first post... Not feeling like writing more for now so here's what some GPT had to say about "Hello, World!":

The phrase "Hello, World!" has become an iconic introduction to programming languages and software development. Its origins can be traced back to the early 1970s, when Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Bell Labs, used it as a simple example in a tutorial for the B programming language. The concept quickly gained popularity and spread to other programming languages, becoming a standard first program for beginners and a way to test new development environments.

The simplicity and universality of "Hello, World!" made it an ideal starting point for learning programming. It demonstrates the basic syntax of a language, how to output text to the console or screen, and often serves as a quick way to verify that a programming environment is set up correctly. As programming languages evolved, the "Hello, World!" program remained a constant, adapting to new paradigms and syntaxes while maintaining its core purpose of providing a simple, achievable first step for novice programmers.

Today, "Hello, World!" continues to be a cornerstone of programming education and culture. It appears in countless tutorials, textbooks, and online courses across a wide range of programming languages and platforms. Beyond its practical applications, "Hello, World!" has also become a symbol of the excitement and potential that comes with learning to code, representing the first step in a journey that can lead to creating complex and innovative software solutions.

PS: The post date is (obviously) wrong. As I said, this is the first post I've written for this blog, and it's not from 2010. But that's when I had my first "Hello World" and it kicked-off my journey to where I am today.