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•Feb 8, 2026
The paper goes deeper
johnthescott•Feb 8, 2026
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".
ksec•Feb 8, 2026
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•Feb 8, 2026
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"
zabzonk•Feb 8, 2026
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•Feb 8, 2026
“It might be hard, but don’t let that stop you from making it worse” :)
IFC_LLC•Feb 8, 2026
I don’t understand how this article is not at the top of all times
jibal•Feb 8, 2026
April 1, 2001
PaulRobinson•Feb 8, 2026
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.
thenoblesunfish•Feb 8, 2026
This location in Switzerland reminded me of some placeholder Python code.
If you opened a bar there, it'd be the Foo Bar. Full circle.
tonfa•Feb 8, 2026
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).
mac3n•Feb 8, 2026
Now, tell us about "ZQX3".
zahlman•Feb 8, 2026
> 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•Feb 8, 2026
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=...
tombert•Feb 8, 2026
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.
greatquux•Feb 8, 2026
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!
14 Comments
> bar /bar/ n. [JARGON] The second metasyntactic variable, after foo and before baz.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#Italian
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".
It wasn't until I tried building something (mad libs) that things "clicked"
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Pass
I found that hilarious as I was hiking through that pass last year (beautiful area).
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.
I never claimed I was terribly mature.