As someone with English as a second language seeing "foobar" all over the place in lot's of different contexts really confused me a lot early on. Especially when docs started talking about a "foo" and a "bar".
I still don't understand why it is the generic go to word for examples, it makes little sense.
Likewise when learning OOP long ago, it seemed like every tutorial used a car with wheels and a steering wheel as examples. Took me a long time afterwards to understand how it could actually be used in practice.
Yeah, the entire car, engine and wheels thing really disconnected OOP from any practical use for me. It really took a long time before I understood how it applied to real code.
If real examples from a blog or accounting software had been used instead then I would likely have understood it a lot easier.
Comments
"(no foobar)"
As someone with English as a second language seeing "foobar" all over the place in lot's of different contexts really confused me a lot early on. Especially when docs started talking about a "foo" and a "bar".
I still don't understand why it is the generic go to word for examples, it makes little sense.
The word "foobar" has a long, long history in computers:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/foo.html
Likewise when learning OOP long ago, it seemed like every tutorial used a car with wheels and a steering wheel as examples. Took me a long time afterwards to understand how it could actually be used in practice.
Yeah, the entire car, engine and wheels thing really disconnected OOP from any practical use for me. It really took a long time before I understood how it applied to real code.
If real examples from a blog or accounting software had been used instead then I would likely have understood it a lot easier.
I guess it's a combination of people following earlier example, and that it sounds funny.
In economics textbooks, companies always produce 'widgets'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_(economics)