I recently felt a strange curiosity about the actual origin of those typical words that are “foo”, “bar” and “baz”, commonly used in computer-related issues such as programming examples. I already knew that they were a wide used way of naming example functions, params… but I really wanted to deeply know about the origin of them, so I googled for a while and I finally reached the wikipedia topic explaining this concept.

Once there, it was a surprise for me knowing about some theories about this, as that one which speculates about foobar to be a phonological interpretation of the first letters of the Runic alphabet. However, the fact which was more surprisingly for me was the existence of an actual RFC talking about this issue: RFC 3092.

I must confess I wasn’t able to stand without taking a brief look into it and I think it’s really funny to read some of the explanations around the foo term, and that’s why I wrote this post: for all the people who, like me, don’t know the meaning of these strange words yet and want to know.

See you