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.
I never claimed I was terribly mature.
> 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.
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.
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.
This location in Switzerland reminded me of some placeholder Python code.
I don’t understand how this article is not at the top of all times
naming is hard.
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"
“It might be hard, but don’t let that stop you from making it worse” :)
f*kt up beyond all recognition. semper fidelis
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".
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.
I never claimed I was terribly mature.
> 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.
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.
There is an entire paper looking at the history, meaning and cultural significance of the foo, bar, baz words: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-019-00387-2
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.
This location in Switzerland reminded me of some placeholder Python code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Pass
funny how in italian the "Metasyntactic variable"[1] are "pippo", "pluto" and "paperino"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#Italian
April 1, 2001
I don’t understand how this article is not at the top of all times
naming is hard.
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"
“It might be hard, but don’t let that stop you from making it worse” :)
f*kt up beyond all recognition. semper fidelis
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".
Now, tell us about "ZQX3".
Echoes of ARPANET.
No mention of “baz”
Part 2, 3rd definition of “foo”mentions baz