[hnlmorg]

It depends on whether you want your Hello World programs to reflect an actual program or just be an approximation.

I’d argue there is little benefit in the latter. Particularly these days where the Hello World of most imperative languages look vaguely similar. Maybe back when LISP, FORTRAN and ALGOL were common it was more useful showing a representation of the kind of syntax one should expect. But that isn’t the case any more.

Plus given the risk of bugs becoming production issues or, worse, security vulnerabilities and the ease and prevalence of which developers now copy and paste code, I think there is now a greater responsibility for examples to make fewer assumptions. Even if that example is just Hello World.

[dmurray]

> It depends on whether you want your Hello World programs to reflect an actual program or just be an approximation. I’d argue there is little benefit in the latter.

There's a huge benefit in having a program that verifies you have set up the programming environment successfully and can build and execute your programs. Far more than the didactic benefit of any "Hello World" program.

Handling terminal output is just an extra nice-to-have at that point, and one convenient way to verify your tools are working. Correct error handling is definitely out of scope.

[hnlmorg]

Interesting take but I see two problems with that:

1. if you're testing your development environment then handling errors appropriately is even more important. The last thing you want to find out is that your development environment doesn't work because of some edge case that wasn't tested.

2. if your code is just to test the development environment then ship that test code with the development environment rather than publish it on your home page as a practical example of your languages code.

What you're describing is effectively a behavioral test, not a Hello World example.