Talk by Warren Sack, professor in the Film & Digital Media Department at the University of California, 2015 and 2016 research-fellow at the Paris IAS, during the general seminar of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

Event on site, speech of Warren Sack in English. 
Event organised by the IHPST.

Program

Talk by Warren Sack on his article published in 2025 in Philosophies journals "Interfacing Programming Language Semantics and Pragmatics: What does “hello, world” mean?". 

Abstract of this article 

In 1978, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie insisted that the first programme written in a new language should be one that displays the words ‘hello, world’. Since then, ‘hello, world’ has often been the first exercise in introductory programming courses. On the one hand, it seems like a good first programme, because it displays something familiar on the screen: a greeting. On the other hand, it is extremely strange. How can it be understood as a greeting? Who is greeting whom? Unfortunately, most formal means of defining programming languages do little to help assign meaning to the ‘hello, world’ programme. It has been argued that the weakness of older theories and methods of programming language semantics is due to the historical and disciplinary segregation (in logic, semiotics, and linguistics) of semantics as a separate study from syntax and pragmatics. Drawing on both more recent work in programming language semantics dealing with side effects and on the conception of programming languages based on speech acts, this article proposes a possible reintegration of semantics and pragmatics in order to better define the meaning of ‘hello, world’ and of programming languages used to produce speech acts more generally.

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