I still write and run Hello World in languages I am well versed in when I start working in a new environment, purely as a sanity check. In many cases it is the simplest starting point to ensure you have a working environment.
As far as familiarizing myself with a new language, I usually write a Hello World, then add some variables, and some functions or whatever is relevant, and just focus on the syntax of the language, or in the case of a platform or framework, take a look at building trivial components.
Not a language, but a platform example: I recently explored ExpressJS (If you're not familiar, its a framework for node.js web apps.) and my workflow was: Make a hello world server, Add a few routes and a static handler, Add some views, Add some middleware, Build it into a basic blog. (Because it's always a blog first, right?)
The whole process was quite quick and gave me a very strong jumping point for ExpressJS. Implementing quicksort or something similar as my first crack would probably have been pretty useless.
So for me its all about context; I tend to start at Hello World and quickly grow something simple, but relevant to the language or platform.
As far as familiarizing myself with a new language, I usually write a Hello World, then add some variables, and some functions or whatever is relevant, and just focus on the syntax of the language, or in the case of a platform or framework, take a look at building trivial components.
Not a language, but a platform example: I recently explored ExpressJS (If you're not familiar, its a framework for node.js web apps.) and my workflow was: Make a hello world server, Add a few routes and a static handler, Add some views, Add some middleware, Build it into a basic blog. (Because it's always a blog first, right?)
The whole process was quite quick and gave me a very strong jumping point for ExpressJS. Implementing quicksort or something similar as my first crack would probably have been pretty useless. So for me its all about context; I tend to start at Hello World and quickly grow something simple, but relevant to the language or platform.