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Please, don't ever use foo/bar examples. No better way to bore and confuse the reader. It's the worst way to educate people about the possibilities of the thing
by kowdermeister 11y ago
Please, don't ever use foo/bar examples. No better way to bore and confuse the reader. It's the worst way to educate people about the possibilities of the thing you want to teach about.
- kwhitefoot 11y agoWhat alternative do you have in mind?
- carussell 11y agoIn the past, I hardly ever used foo and bar in my examples, for that reason. Over the last two years or so, I've strived to start using them. There's history of using foo/bar/baz in examples. So it's a very quick way to signal to the reader, "What this is isn't the important part. The meat of the discussion isn't in this; he crux of it lies elsewhere," and that's a pretty important thing. There's a cost in using "real" examples. There's a cost to you the author in coming up with them, and then there's the cost to the reader who has to unpack the domain-specific concepts in the example you're synthesizing and disentangle it from what you're actually trying to demonstrate. Do use foo and bar whenever possible.