Hello, World!: A Brief History of Programming in 90 Languages

In 2006, a programmer climbed twenty-one flights of stairs because his elevator's software had crashed again. By the time he reached his apartment, he had decided to build a language that would make those bugs impossible. The White House ended up recommending it by name. In 1952, Grace Hopper built the first compiler, and nobody believed her. In 1964, two Dartmouth professors typed RUN at 4 AM and launched the personal computer revolution. In 1995, Brendan Eich built JavaScript in ten days and accidentally created the most widely deployed programming language on earth. Hello, World! tells all of these stories and 85 more. 90 programming languages, 76 years, from Konrad Zuse's Plankalkul in 1948 to Gleam in 2024. Each language gets one page: who made it, why, what the code looks like, and what happened next. 28 spotlight narratives go deeper into the human drama behind the code. Dip in anywhere or read it front to back and watch the entire history of programming unfold. Reviewed and corrected by language creators.