Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dawsoneliasen 1243 days ago
Is it just me or is that a terrible “hello world”? I get that they’re trying to illustrate a few features but the whole point of hello world is that it is the absolute most simple program. Why put the string world into a variable named world just to show that you can insert a variable into a string? It looks so confusing.
1 comments

I read that as "Yes, Bog does formatted strings", and appreciate the density.
The purpose of a Hello World, however, is not to showcase language features, it’s to provide a minimal program that produces output, to test that your dev environment is working properly, and for you to learn how to operate it. Adding any unnecessary complications to it only adds further sources of error.
Do you think real people will get confused and think the only way to write hello world in bog is using a variable ?

Or do you think most people will automatically adjust and think "hello world in itself doesn't show much, so the author decided to include something more informative and keep call that hello world" ?

I think he shouldn‘t have called it a Hello World if its purpose is to showcase a language feature instead of serving as an actual Hello World.
Obviously the examples in a README for a programming language are going to showcase said language's features.