The canonical, minimal, first program that a programmer writes in a new programming language or development environment. The program just prints "hello, world" to standard output in order to verify that the programmer can successfully edit, compile and run a simple program before embarking on anything more challenging. Hello, world is the first example program in the C programming book, K&R, and the tradition has spread from there to pretty much every other language and many of their textbooks. Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a hairy compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered bad.