Hello world is how a lot of us started in C with the K&R book, wherever we were. Most of us didn't want to organize photo folders, we wanted to make the computer display something cool or play a song or something, and usually we had to start with something elementary when tackling a new language, especially a complicated one like C.

I can still remember being 11 years old and meticulously keying in the hello world program on my dad's aging Tandy Model 16, then saying 'cc hello.c' and watching as the compiler chugged through the tiny program for a minute or two. (It #includes stdio.h, so there was more code to go through than it seemed, plus there was a linking step. And not much actually happened, because Unix C compilers are silent if there are no errors.)

When I ran a.out and saw "hello world" appear, I was over the moon. It was like clearing 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Like I had surmounted the first obstacle and was thus ready for all the challenges that lay ahead.