May 5, 2009, 3:40 pm
I have a theory. It goes something like this. At one point there was the primal program. Let’s call it hello.c it does something very simple, it prints Hello World. My theory states that virtually every program is a variation of this program. From the BASIC 10 PRINT “Hello World!” or Fortran PROGRAM HELLO WRITE (*,100) STOP 100 FORMAT (’ Hello World! ‘ /) END to the classic main() { puts(”Hello World!”); return 0; }, most beginners started adding code to these simple examples.
Don’t believe me? Maybe you used some modern wimpy language. I’m sure you started with a simple example program. Let’s do a survey. How many of you started programming with a one or two line program. Raise you hands. Keep your hands up. How about the rest of you. How many of you took an simple existing program and modified it as the basis of a new program. I see lot’s of hands. Some have both hands raised. Okay, you can put hands down now.
