5 ms·
"(no foobar)" As someone with English as a second language seeing "foobar" all over the place in lot's of different contexts really confused me a lot early on.
by chillfox 6y ago
"(no foobar)"
As someone with English as a second language seeing "foobar" all over the place in lot's of different contexts really confused me a lot early on. Especially when docs started talking about a "foo" and a "bar".
I still don't understand why it is the generic go to word for examples, it makes little sense.
- eru 6y agoI guess it's a combination of people following earlier example, and that it sounds funny. In economics textbooks, companies always produce 'widgets'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(economics)
- Vinnl 6y agoLikewise when learning OOP long ago, it seemed like every tutorial used a car with wheels and a steering wheel as examples. Took me a long time afterwards to understand how it could actually be used in practice.
- chillfox 6y agoYeah, the entire car, engine and wheels thing really disconnected OOP from any practical use for me. It really took a long time before I understood how it applied to real code. If real examples from a blog or accounting software had been used instead then I would likely have understood it a lot easier.
- ansible 6y agoThe word "foobar" has a long, long history in computers: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foo.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foo.html