This is nice — a page maintained by the ACM which lists the code needed to print “Hello World” (the classic first output of the neophyte programmer) in 193 programming languages. I particularly like how Java does it:

class HelloWorld {
public static void main (String args[]) {
for (;;) {
System.out.print(“Hello World “);
}
}
}

Don’t you just love “public static void main”? Reminds one of George W. Bush.

Perl is fairly terse:

print “Hello, World!\n” while (1);

but not as elegant as Python:

print “Hello world!”

Thanks to Scott Rosenberg, who set me Googling for this, and whose lovely book I am currently devouring.

More… James Miller kindly points out that good ol’ BASIC is just as elegant:

PRINT “Hello world!”