For some reasons, today I finally had the mood to look up the origin of “foo” and “bar”. For those of us who write programs, in many if not all programming books we often see variables and functions or even classes named “foo” or “bar” without further explanations. The more you read the more you ignore this innocent question “why foo and bar?”

It turns out foo and bar are from the acronym FUBAR. It means, well, why don’t you check out the full meaning here: http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/archive/2004/05/19/134665.aspx .

It seems to me that programming jobs have always been tough throughout the decades. 😉