1957

4 lines to say hello

It started with Fortran. John Backus and his team at IBM wanted to make programming practical. They spent nearly four years building a compiler that could turn math-like notation into machine code. For the first time, a human could write something close to algebra and a machine would understand.

PROGRAM HELLO WRITE (*,*) 'Hello, World!' STOP END

1969

Code lands on the Moon

Margaret Hamilton's team at MIT writes the Apollo 11 guidance software - in assembly, by hand. The code stack, printed out, is taller than her. On descent, the computer throws a 1202 alarm. Her priority scheduling saves the mission. The software works. Neil Armstrong walks.

# AGC assembly - actual code TC BANKCALL CADR R60LEM TC INTPRET DLOAD PIPTIME

1972

5 lines to say hello. Then they rewrote Unix in it.

Dennis Ritchie wrote C at Bell Labs. Then used C to rewrite Unix. Then AT&T licensed Unix to universities for almost nothing. C spread everywhere - operating systems, compilers, embedded firmware. Ritchie died a week after Steve Jobs in October 2011. Jobs got the headlines. Ritchie built the infrastructure that made Jobs' work possible.

#include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello, World!\n"); return 0; }

1991

The first website goes live

Tim Berners-Lee makes the World Wide Web publicly available from a NeXT workstation at CERN, running a server written in C. Researchers notice. The public doesn't. Within five years, five new languages will be born for it.

/* CERN httpd - written in C */ /* Ran on a NeXT cube */ /* One machine. One page. */ /* 5.5 billion web users later... */

1995

Five languages in four years

Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, PHP. Five languages in five years, 1991 to 1995. Four of them launched in '95 alone. Brendan Eich wrote JavaScript in 10 days. Rasmus Lerdorf built PHP to maintain his personal homepage. Guido van Rossum started Python as a Christmas-break hobby project. We're still living with all three decisions.

System.out.println("Hello!"); // Java console.log("Hello!"); // JS echo "Hello!"; // PHP print("Hello!") # Python puts "Hello!" # Ruby

1998

Google launches

Two Stanford PhD students build a search engine using Python, Java, and C++. The PageRank algorithm runs on commodity hardware. The search engine indexes 26 million pages. Today Google handles 8.5 billion searches per day. Larry and Sergey never finished their PhDs.

# The original PageRank # was a Python script that # ranked pages by who # linked to them. # # Simple idea. # $2 trillion company.

2004

A dorm room, PHP, one server

Mark Zuckerberg builds "TheFacebook" in his Harvard dorm. PHP and MySQL. 3 billion monthly users later, Meta created Hack - a language evolved from PHP with static typing and better tooling. The codebase was migrated, but Hack's syntax still traces back to those first PHP files.

<?php echo "Hello, " . $user . "!"; // That's basically how // Facebook started. // PHP. MySQL. Apache. // One server in a dorm. ?>

2007

The iPhone ships

Steve Jobs pulls a phone out of his pocket at Macworld. The App Store won't open until 2008, but when it does, every app will be written in Objective-C - a Smalltalk-C hybrid that was niche outside the Apple ecosystem. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of developers have to learn bracket syntax. Six years later, Apple will introduce Swift as its successor.

// Every iPhone app, 2007-2014 [UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:@"Hello!" message:@"Welcome to iOS" delegate:nil cancelButtonTitle:@"OK" otherButtonTitles:nil];

2008

Bitcoin: a 9-page PDF and 30,000 lines of C++

Satoshi Nakamoto - identity still unknown - publishes a whitepaper and releases a C++ implementation. A peer-to-peer currency with no central bank. In 2010, 10,000 Bitcoin buy two pizzas. At Bitcoin's peak, those pizzas were worth over $1 billion.

// Bitcoin Core - still C++ class CBlock { int nVersion; uint256 hashPrevBlock; uint256 hashMerkleRoot; unsigned int nTime; unsigned int nBits; unsigned int nNonce; };

2013

Docker: a 5-minute lightning talk

Solomon Hykes demos Docker at PyCon in a 5-minute talk. "It's like a shipping container for code." Written in Go - a language designed by the co-creators of Unix while waiting for C++ to compile. Docker changes how every company on earth deploys software. Kubernetes follows. The cloud is rewritten.

package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Println("Hello!") } // Docker: Go // Kubernetes: Go // Terraform: Go

2017

"Attention Is All You Need"

Eight Google researchers publish a paper that will reshape the tech industry. The Transformer architecture. Written in Python and TensorFlow. GPT, BERT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA - nearly every major large language model builds on this one paper. The authors didn't know what they'd started. Some of them still aren't sure.

# The line that changed everything attention = softmax( Q @ K.T / sqrt(d_k) ) @ V # 8 authors. 1 paper. # Every AI since.

2022

ChatGPT: 100 million users in 2 months

OpenAI releases a chatbot built on PyTorch, Python, and the Transformer architecture. It writes code, essays, poems. 100 million users in two months. For the first time, people who can't write code are having conversations with systems that can.

import openai response = openai.chat( model="gpt-4", messages=[{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello, World!" }] ) # AI writes Hello World now.

Now

1 line. 69 years. 3,600+ attempts.

Hello World is one line now. But the story was never about making code shorter. It was about a Dartmouth professor who thought English majors should use computers. A linguist who was tired of sed and awk. A mother of three who designed a language for the Pentagon. A bored grad student over Christmas break. Every language is someone's answer to: I can do this better.

print("Hello, World!") # From punch cards to AI. # From Margaret Hamilton's # stack of paper # to a chatbot that writes # its own code. # # 3,600+ attempts. # The story continues.