Traditionally, the first program written in a new language is called Hello, World! because all it does is display the words, Hello, World! In Python, the source code looks like this.
This is an example of using the print function, which doesn’t actually print anything on paper. It displays a value on the screen. The term is left over from the days when it was more common to output the result of our computer programs to paper rather than to the screen. In this case, the result is the phrase:
The quotation marks in the program mark the beginning and end of the value. They don’t appear in the result. You’ll learn more about why in the next chapter.
Some people judge the quality of a programming language by the simplicity of the Hello, World! program. By this standard, Python does about as well as possible.
