Well, it’s a name that just popped into my head one day while playing with some code. If someone asked me to tell him what this invented word means, I’d have to say that it is the feeling that a programmer, a hacker, gets when he is on roll and knows that the hack he is doing right now is super-cool. It is the eureka moment you get when you suddenly realized the solution to a bind-boggling problem. It is the feeling you get when you hunt down and squash to mere pulp the most annoying bug you were ever faced with after a couple of days of exhausting debugging. In other, simpler, words it’s the joy of  hacking.

When I finally decided to setup my own blog, it was clear to me how it should be named. Hence, centriment.com. In this blog I will try and share my experiences and opinions in the field of computing.

If you are also wondering about the subtitle, “stories of the spirit living inside the computer”, it is a tribute to the wizard book (Stucture and Interpretation of Computer Programs) and its authors, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, one the best computer books I ever read (still reading it actually ).

This is my first blog post! I am very excited about starting my own blog. I have been a software engineer for many years now and I have always thought about sharing my experiences in the field of computing with others, through a place of my own, but I never seemed to have the time to get down with it. Finally, I’ve setup my own domain, installed wordpress, installed a theme and while writing this I am still experimenting a bit with it.

Since the first thing we do when learning a new programming language is to write a “hello world” program, and this is the first post in this blog, this is about… “Hello Word”!

And here it is in C, the first “real” programming language I’ve learned:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  printf("Hello Word!");
  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Here it is in C#:

using System;
public class Application
{
  public static void Main(string[] args)
  {
    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
  }
}

And here it is in Python:

print "Hello World!"

Every time you start to learn a new language or system you begin by making a simple “hello world” application. It is not useful, it does not do anything, it’s plain stupid code. However, it’s all the most exciting because that’s when you start learning something new and unknown to you. Even such simple code has a lot of knowledge to convey to its author. First of all, you learn if the code has to be compiled and interpreted, if it is compiled to machine code or some other intermediate language executed by a virtual machine. You are also exposed to the basic rules and coding styles. You learn if a language is object oriented, loosely or strictly typed.

Soon after that, you start writing a little less trivial things and start feeling like a kid with a new toy. As you learn even more, you start feeling like a little god that can meddle with his own privately created universe.

And now this is my “hello world” in the blog world!

Remember your “hello world!”s?