Tags, hyphens and little flags
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- Written by: Cristoforo Prodan
- Category: Blog
- A brief linguistic history of the everyday web
Sometimes the human mind takes strange paths, as it does in dreams. We focus on an apparently insignificant detail and, as we follow its implications, that detail becomes the white rabbit leading us down its hole. This is what happened to me one day while I was deciding how to write the tags for a personal website of mine.
hello, world
- Details
- Written by: Cristoforo Prodan
- Category: Blog
- Back to the future
The first post of a blog could very well begin with the best-known and most historically charged test phrase in the world of computer programming: hello, world. Tradition has it that it was originally written strictly in lowercase, as in one of its early appearances in Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie’s celebrated 1978 book The C Programming Language, where it appeared as the output of the first and simplest program written in that language. It became a kind of initiation rite for programmers: proof that something works, that the language responds, that the screen does not remain silent.
And yet the question is unavoidable: what sense does it make to start a blog in 2026?