History

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 . ...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a name foreign to many of us. I recently watched his autobiography DVD, and I am deeply impacted by how he lived his life. From the PBS website: He was born into a comfortable, upper middle class family and he risked it all to join the German Resistance. He had deep respect for human life, but he committed himself to joining plots to assassinate Hitler. Facing the death sentence in prison, he wrote some of the most compelling theology of the 20th century. ...