The “Hello, World!” program is intended to be an educational exercise. A high-level language like Python has a pretty straightforward way to output “Hello, World!”, but it kind of defeats the point of learning something in the process.
About fifteen years ago, I won a pair of tickets to a concert on the radio. I invited an amateur musician friend who worked in the computer industry. In the car ride to the concert, I told him I wanted to improve my general computer skills. He responded that I should work on regular expressions.
Recently, another friend tells me how he uses AI to form regular expressions. And other friends, when I tell them I want to change my website from static html to dynamic (sqlite/php), giving me the same suggestion: Type a prompt into AI and seeing what comes out.
Agreed, there are many things in life where I’m more focused on the outcome than I am the process. I use many small command-line utilities in the making of my student videos. And I only have a surface understanding of each of those utilities.
But there is a point where the conventional notion of what it means to be “smart” (getting more done with less mental effort) crosses over into ignorance and stupidity.
