hello, world

Curator’s note

Character for character this is the same program as the Lua on the opposite wall, and the two languages could hardly be less alike. That is worth standing between them to notice: at this size, language design is invisible. Everything that distinguishes these two — one built to disappear inside other programs, the other built to be the program — begins on line two.

The parentheses have a history. For most of Python's life this was print "hello, world", a statement rather than a function call, and turning it into a function was among the changes that split the language into Python 2 and Python 3 for the better part of a decade. Of all the incompatibilities in that migration this was the smallest and by far the most visible, because it broke the first line of every tutorial ever written.

So the two characters that look like the most trivial detail on this wall are the ones that made this exact program, in this exact language, a marker of which era you learned in.