[dllthomas]

I seriously don't see how a stand-alone "hello world" program is meaningfully "interact[ing] with the outside world" in a way that printing a string at the REPL is not. Stop ranting and posturing, and instead please try to unpack that.

In either case you are simply printing a string to the terminal. The standalone program is easier to compose in your shell, which in some contexts matters a lot, but I don't see that it does here. Where is the difference?

Further, if we define "interact with the outside world" in a way that excludes the programmer reading things off the screen, then it's plainly wrong that all such programs are "literally useless". Calculators, for instance, have delivered a tremendous amount of value. I've personally run something at a REPL (in various languages) plenty of times because I had actual use for the value to be printed and didn't need to persist the program.

[goto11]

The point of "Hello world" is that it is the simplest possible real, working program. It can be compiled and executed and you could deploy it to users or to a production environment if you wanted.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."

I understand that from a certain theoretical perspective it is just the same thing to echo a string literal in a REPL, but from a software development perspective it is completely different.

> The standalone program is easier to compose in your shell, which in some contexts matters a lot, but I don't see that it does here.

I kind of see where you are coming from. You are assuming the program is only ever used by yourself. I understand this is just a different culture and hadn't even thought about that perspective.