Hello, Snarky Programmer!

The first program a fledgling programmer is supposed to write is a “Hello, world” program, which literally does nothing but print out the phrase “Hello, world.” I’m not sure why it’s a thing, but all programmers know what it is.

I was going to a highly-rated college for programming and was taking the Operating Systems course, the most notoriously hard class in the entire curriculum, where we had to build our own functional operating system. We were nearing the end of when our last assignment was due, and of course, it was the hardest of all the assignments. Most of us were pulling a few all-nighters to get it done in time.

When class time rolled around for the course, we all filtered into the usual classroom to find someone had been doodling on the whiteboard in the room. In large, colorful letters, the unknown vandal had written, “HELLO, WORLD!” Underneath that, in much smaller writing, they added, “(Goodbye, social life.)”

One of my peers pointed it out, and we were all getting a bit of a chuckle out of it when our professor walked in and saw it.

Professor: “Okay, who wrote that? We have to erase it immediately! I’m not allowed to be that honest with you folks until after finals are over!”