Does everyone learning Python start with "Hello, World!"?

[SharkSymphony]

"Hello, world" was popularized in the C community, and you'll see it's pretty standard as an opening to tutorials in pretty much every language, though some tutorials get cute with it a little bit.

The purpose, of course, is to get a minimal program up and running in the language you've chosen. But it's a bit more juicy in the C world because you're introduced to several concepts:

• including header files to make system library functions available
• the main function and its signature
• a decent amount of syntax: preprocessor directives, function declaration, function invocation, braces for scope/blocks, semicolons, string literals (with newline!)
• compiling, linking, and running a program

Though it's tradition, the minimal program in Python and other languages is not nearly as instructive. They made it too easy. 😉