Why the name?

Hello / World

Two words. The first piece of code almost every developer has ever written. Here is where it came from, why it stuck, and why we chose it for this company.

w h

Origin

A small program with a long history

1972, Bell Labs

The line was first printed in 1972 by Brian Kernighan, in an internal Bell Labs memorandum titled 'A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B'. He wanted the simplest possible program that did something visible: open the door, print a greeting, prove the toolchain worked.

1978, K&R

Six years later, Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie put 'hello, world' on the first page of 'The C Programming Language'. The book sold millions of copies. From that moment on, almost every programming tutorial on the planet started in the same place.

1980 to today

Forty-plus years later, it is still the first thing you write in Python, in JavaScript, in Rust, in Go, in Swift, in Kotlin, in any language that ships with a compiler and a printable string. It is the universal first move.

First lines

The same idea, eight ways

Every language gets its own dialect. The instinct is the same: the simplest possible thing, running, today.

C (1978)
```
printf("hello, world\n");
```
Python
```
print("Hello, world!")
```
JavaScript
```
console.log("Hello, world!");
```
Go
```
fmt.Println("Hello, world!")
```
Rust
```
println!("Hello, world!");
```
Swift
```
print("Hello, world!")
```
Ruby
```
puts "Hello, world!"
```
HTML
```
<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
```

Why we picked it

It is a posture, not a slogan

Hello World is what you type when you want to know if something actually runs. Not 'will it scale?', not 'how does it integrate?', not 'what does the deck look like?'. Just: does it work, today, in front of me.

That is how we work. We open a real environment, we write the smallest thing that proves the idea, we ship it into the business and we look at it together. Decks come later. Bigger systems come later. But nothing else gets built until something is running.

We have been doing this for twenty-five years now, across the consumer internet, the mobile era, the platform era and now AI. Same instinct every time. Get the first line printing. Then keep going.

Talk

Let's talk

Thirty minutes. Whichever pillar fits, same conversation, same people. If it fits somewhere else better, we'll say so and connect you to someone from the network.

Meet the team Get in touch

Sam Renders, AI Entrepreneur — Sam Renders

Nick Velten, AI Entrepreneur — Nick Velten

hello@helloworld.amsterdam