from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
hello, world
hello
<programming> The canonical minimal test message in the
{C}/{Unix} universe or any of the minimal programs that emit
this message.
Traditionally, the first program a C coder writes in a new
environment is one that just prints "hello, world" to standard
output (and indeed it is the first example program in {K&R}).
Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable
for this trivial test or which require a {hairy}
compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered bad.
(2007-10-30)