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Comment by fholec | Hacker News Reader

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?

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In case anyone else has ever wondered:

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.

Excuse me, fossils?

It's only offensive if you're being carried around.

I think they're referring to the artifacts (like foo) rather than people.

Yes and still don't comprehend why to call certain things fossils if they are still used by virtually everybody

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.

I think foo never outlived what it was from the beginning - a way to harmlessly goof around while describing complex systems & patterns. So, really dunno why the commenter above wanted to atribute all the fooness to something "ancient".

PS. Unsure why to mix petroleum into this discussion..

Not the usage, the context.

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