Hello, World · Berkant Kul

The first example in almost every programming book prints the same sentence. The tradition goes back to a tutorial Brian Kernighan wrote for the B language in 1972, and then to the 1978 book The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. The example below is the book’s code adapted to today’s standard C. The 1978 edition simply read main() { printf("hello, world\n"); }.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
    return 0;
}

Since then, everyone who learns a new language, framework or platform starts with the same ritual: printing a hello on the screen. The function of this small ritual is not technical but symbolic. It says the channel is open and we can begin. It is like a historian recording the catalogue details of a document before reading it: before saying anything, we prove that we have something to say.

This blog opens with the same ritual. Hello, world.

What will I write about?

Here is the short list:

New technology: new tools, platforms and their effects on society,
Artificial intelligence: especially large language models; what they can and cannot do, and how they change our relationship with each other and with knowledge,
History and historiography: method and source criticism,
Software: engineering culture, practice and the intellectual side of code.

But I must admit that the places I care about most lie between the items on the list. Scanning an archive with code, turning a chronicle into data, putting a language model through source criticism… Things that stay invisible through the window of a single discipline become visible when the windows are placed side by side.

Why a blog?

There are two reasons: an old one and a new one.

The old one is simple. Writing is the slowest and most honest form of thinking. An idea that shines in your mind often fades on its way to becoming a sentence, and that is the quickest way to find out whether it really shone. Historians have known this for centuries: to understand a document, you have to write about it.

The new one is this: the most productive medium of the early internet was the personal weblog. Social networks absorbed most of that noise, but they have never replaced long-form writing, lasting links and the idea of “text that lives on your own server”. Publishing an essay is a different act from posting to a feed. It is slower, more deliberate and more permanent.

In a nutshell

What is the purpose of this first post?

This post is also a hello, world: do the links work, does the theme look right? For now, yes. After this first sentence, see you in the next post.

References

Kernighan, B. W., & Ritchie, D. M. (1978). The C programming language. Prentice-Hall.
Ritchie, D. M. (1993). The development of the C language. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 28(3), 201–208. https://doi.org/10.1145/155360.155580
Ritchie, D. M., Johnson, S. C., Lesk, M. E., & Kernighan, B. W. (1978). UNIX time-sharing system: The C programming language. Bell System Technical Journal, 57(6), 1991–2019.