RFC 3092 - Etymology of "Foo" (2001) | Hacker News Reader

RFC 3092 - Etymology of "Foo" (2001)

tools.ietf.org

39 pointsauvi17 comments

Back in my high school days, when I started my first step towards programming for real as opposed to the stuff I've done with DOS batch files, one of the first books I read was the Camel book (Programming Perl - that's what everybody was using for their CGI scripts back then).

Their use of foo, bar and foobar without explanation was extremely confusing to me and made the whole book very difficult to understand for me as my brain constantly wasted brain cycles on trying to understand these words in the code samples.

Of course it didn't help that back then my English was practically not existent yet.

It's funny how these completely made-up words have become real jargon one has to know when working in this industry, to the point where at least for me personally, not knowing them was a huge barrier to understanding a basic book about our profession

(I might also just have been too young yet. I remember reading the chapter about regexes (littered with foobar) and thinking "nobody in their right mind can find this useful for anything")

    RFC 3092 - Etymology of "Foo" (2001) (ietf.org)

The 2001 in the title really should be 1 April 2001, lest someone thinks this RFC is otherwise notable in some way.

Why? It's not a prank.

    Angostura 15 minutes ago | link | parent | flag
    Why? It's not a prank.

I sense that you have a future in marketing [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day_Request_for_Co...

It depends on your definition of "prank", I guess, but most April Fools RFCs present perfectly accurate, if somewhat bizarre, takes on their subject matter. IP over Avian Carrier and IPv6 over Social Network both were implemented.

In France we use toto and tata. At least it's easier to see those words as examples. As a teenaegr, learning some languages, I thought using foo & bar was mandatory. Very confusing.

"toto" and "tata" may well be easier for you, but I find it easier to see "foo" and "bar" as examples. The point is that no word will be universally seen as an example without meaning, so documents like the one in the link are necessary.

Comments like "xyz is easier" forget that we aren't all the same.

It is easier for you now that you know that they are examples. The syllabe repetition in toto and tata make it a little more obvious I think. But you are right we aren't all the same, which was the point of my initial post. Then I managed to pretend we are superior :)

But Toto is the name of a band and Tata the name of an industrial complex that produces, among other things, cars.

Toto is a fictional dog. Tata is a now famous football manager.

Foobar applies to most of my code.

In Chinese, repeated syllables are very common in everyday speech, so they might think that tata and toto were abbreviations of something significant.

example: 胖胖 (pàng pàng) "fat fat," nickname for a fat child in the class (generally considered a compliment.)

Chinese speakers are also (according to my teacher) very fond of the English "Bye Bye" for goodbye, since it follows the same pattern, and will use it in place of 再见 (zài jiàn) "again see" if they know you will understand it.

English also uses mama (mother), papa (father), ta-ta (goodbye).

Amusingly, Polish uses pa for goodbye (not infrequently doubled up) and tata for father.

Fun to see a local variants. In Japan, "hoge" and sometimes "hogehoge" are often used.

Interesting, there are several international variations listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#Words_co...

“Many smoke but foo men chew.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_Manchu

foo /foo/ n. People whom Mr. T pities or otherwise considers distasteful.

Actually, it was just Balboa.

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