[Pedrom]

Funny... but perl or python are not the only ones to make one-line print statements and about Lisp... what about (display "Hello world") or just "Hello World" ? :)

[ChuckMcM]

Or 'echo "Hello World"'

for shell/bash users.

And the manager should really do it as a requirements document.

  Due Date: ASAP
  Required Functionality: Displaying of a message.
  Message contents: Hello World
  Resources Available for implementation: 1
  Budgetary Impact: In plan
  Localization Required?: Yes
  Account Authorization: <signature>
  Audit Sign-off: <signature>
  Conformance statement and Legal review: <signature>
  Quality Inspection Review: <signature>
  Localization signoff: <signature>
  Security Review: <signature>

[ghc]

Lisp wasn't the right tool for the job because back when this was written (1997 or so, if I remember correctly) there were a lot of reasons Lisp was not the right tool for the job, the biggest reason being that chances were your Unix admin had made sure Python or Perl was available, but not Lisp (outside of Emacs).

[Turing_Machine]

If the goal is minimalism, why not just:

echo Hello World

at the command prompt? That works in every Unix or Linux shell I know of, and even MS-DOS. There's no need to fire up a separate full-blown interpreter or worry about it being installed. :-)