Smokey Stover, the 1935 "Where there's foo, there's fire" guy, was a TV cartoon in the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Stover#Animation Influenced by german furchtbar/foobar/fubar, MIT used fu() and bar() in the late '30s.
A lot of programming languages uses "Foo bar" during introduction without actually explaining why "Foo" and why "bar". Before the age of Google and Internet it was perhaps one of the most common question from speakers of non-English language.
Even many decades later I remember the frustration in university 100-level CS courses of every new concept demonstrated with a mess of foo(), int* bar, void** baz scribbled on a overhead projector.
Descriptive names are helpful, people! I think even back in the 90s C supported at least 31 characters.
This was one of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome when I was a wee lad combing through "Professional PHP Programming." All of the examples it gave were foo/bar, and I couldn't make the intellectual leap to understand what the real world use cases would be.
It wasn't until I tried building something (mad libs) that things "clicked"
I stole this handle from GLS many many years ago and I use it pretty much everywhere. I guess I just love the idea of metasyntactic variables, and using that phrase whenever anyone asks me about my handle!
Turns out “foo/bar/baz” has lore. I assumed it was just tribal placeholder magic.
Now I’m wondering what other dev fossils we still carry around - IDDQD (Doom god-mode) is a personal favorite. What’s yours?
IDDQD stands for Id Delta Quit Delta, a fraternity created by DOOM programmer Dave Taylor who released that if you drop out or quit a course you get a statistically-better final grade than you would by failing the course. Of course, you still end up not achieving a degree, hence when used in-game it shows "Degreelessness Mode" activated.
Petroleum is used by everyone right? And it's a literal fossil. I wouldn't call it a fossil because all terminology has lore, but the idea as I understand it is that it's an artifact that outlived the context it was originally relevant in.
> It has been plausibly suggested that "foobar" spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because "foo bar" parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal.
Can anyone educate me what "inverted foo signal" means here, in connection to electronics?
Being largely self taught, I ended reinventing a lot of lingo myself. My placeholder words are generally “blah”, “yo”, and “fart” unless other people are reading the code.
> First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in
syntax examples (bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply,
waldo, fred, plugh, xyzzy, thud)
I've seen foo, bar, baz, qu+x, plugh and xyxxy actually in use, not the others.
I've not used "qux" or followed the convention of adding more u's. From me it's been just foo, bar, baz, quux and then some Monty Python inspired ones: spam, ni, ecky, ptong.
Although eventually I learned enough about how to name things that I don't feel the temptation any more. I'll gladly pay that bit of joylessness to understand myself months later.
I've never seen qu+x, except in the title of that Gundam installment released last year, Gundam gquuuuuux. I found this speculation on myanimelist sufficient, but there's no real confirmation afaik. https://myanimelist.net/forum/?goto=post&topicid=2209708&id=...
IETF have a habit of posting "fun" RFCs on the 1st April each year. Some of them are more famous for being completely daft ("avian carriers" and climbing into trees to watch 0s and 1s painted on the top of tanks being the two stand-out ones), but it doesn't mean that everything they do on that date is to be disregarded as nonsense.
i first heard "foo bar" from eric allman at berkeley office of britton-lee, mid 1980s. i vaguely recall eric wrote a column about history of "foo bar".
I always hated foo, bar, & baz. These vars are always pushed by uncreative individuals. I directly equate it with middle-management types that drive black BMWs and have the personality of milquetoast and golf. No thanks, I'll stick with zig, zag, and zip. If you don't like it too bad, write your own throwaway code.
https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/s13347-019-00387-2
Foo, Bar, Baz…: The Metasyntactic Variable and the Programming Language Hierarchy / by Brian Lennon
Descriptive names are helpful, people! I think even back in the 90s C supported at least 31 characters.
It wasn't until I tried building something (mad libs) that things "clicked"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Pass
I found that hilarious as I was hiking through that pass last year (beautiful area).
https://www.foobarclt.com/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#Italian
IDDQD stands for Id Delta Quit Delta, a fraternity created by DOOM programmer Dave Taylor who released that if you drop out or quit a course you get a statistically-better final grade than you would by failing the course. Of course, you still end up not achieving a degree, hence when used in-game it shows "Degreelessness Mode" activated.
Can anyone educate me what "inverted foo signal" means here, in connection to electronics?
I never claimed I was terribly mature.
I've seen foo, bar, baz, qu+x, plugh and xyxxy actually in use, not the others.
I've not used "qux" or followed the convention of adding more u's. From me it's been just foo, bar, baz, quux and then some Monty Python inspired ones: spam, ni, ecky, ptong.
Although eventually I learned enough about how to name things that I don't feel the temptation any more. I'll gladly pay that bit of joylessness to understand myself months later.
my advice to junior programmers after i see them agonising over a name - "just call it x or foo for now, you are going to change it later anyway"
i first heard "foo bar" from eric allman at berkeley office of britton-lee, mid 1980s. i vaguely recall eric wrote a column about history of "foo bar".
What does ZQX3 have to do with TFA?
> bar /bar/ n. [JARGON] The second metasyntactic variable, after foo and before baz.