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
END1969
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
PIPTIME1972
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!" # Ruby1998
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: Go2017
"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.