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

• ahazred8ta

  today at 4:15 PM

  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.

  • readthenotes1

    today at 10:15 PM

    The paper goes deeper

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.

• mvkel

  today at 8:06 PM

  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"

This location in Switzerland reminded me of some placeholder Python code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Pass

• junon

  today at 9:15 PM

  If you opened a bar there, it'd be the Foo Bar. Full circle.

  • tonfa

    today at 10:22 PM

    Actually the river that goes next to it is called the Foobach (which would be pronounced close to foobar).

    I found that hilarious as I was hiking through that pass last year (beautiful area).

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.

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!

funny how in italian the "Metasyntactic variable"[1] are "pippo", "pluto" and "paperino"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#Italian

> 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.

• orsorna

  today at 8:36 PM

  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=...

April 1, 2001

• PaulRobinson

  today at 10:05 PM

  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 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"

• paulddraper

  today at 6:40 PM

  “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".

Echoes of ARPANET.

Now, tell us about "ZQX3".

No mention of “baz”

• hk__2

  today at 7:54 PM

  It’s literally in the first sentence of the first definition:

  > bar /bar/ n. [JARGON] The second metasyntactic variable, after foo and before baz.

• stephenlf

  today at 3:37 PM

  Part 2, 3rd definition of “foo”mentions baz