Foo Bar, Hello World, and Lorem Ipsum
While working as a dev, you will undoubtedly find yourself spending hours and hours reviewing documentation, StackOverflow forums, and other online resources. One of the things I noticed early on was that almost all examples seemed to use similar words, such as “foo”, “bar”, “lorem ipsum….” and “Hello World”. In this blog I wanted to dig deeper into the origins of why these words seem to have become the standard in the tech world.
“Foo Bar” are very commonly seen as variables in samples and examples. Some sources will claim that this is an interpretation of “F.U.B.A.R.”, a military term that I won’t fully explain, but for those of you who are familiar with it, it seems like the perfect acronym to use when debugging code. As satisfying as it would be to just accept this reality and laugh, a deeper dive gets us to likely the “true” reason. Most sources maintain that the origins of “foo” can be tied back to MIT in the 1960’s. Many sources will claim the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club as being the ones to put foo on the map, often using the term to describe scram switches that were meant to keep model trains from unwanted behavior. When one of these scram switches was flipped, it would also change a digital clock in the room to display ‘FOO” instead of the time, leading the members to call them “foo switches”. Later in the 60’s and into the 70’s, the term “foobar” gained popularity in tech circles, making its way into print publications by the Digital Equipment Corporation, and even being used as a variable name in the code of Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the early text-based RPGs. Fast forward to 2020, and it is hard to find sources that provide generic code snippets and do not use the variables “foo” and “bar”.
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”
Lorem ipsum refers to a block of “dummy text” that is commonly used during design. The idea behind it, is that since it is written in latin, it is less distracting and will not distract the developer from the styling or task at hand. It is said that the distribution of spacing and letters is more suitable than using something such as “content goes here content goes here” or other popular fillers. The idea of using this text actually originated in the printing and typesetting industry, where it is a commonly used practice. The words themselves are taken from an old latin text entitled “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero, more specifically sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33. Today, there are even plug-ins you can find that will generate lorem ipsum for you based on how large of a field or how many words you are trying to fill.
For my first few days of Flatiron, I found it funny that many labs involved printing out “Hello, World!”. The further and further I got on my journey, I noticed “Hello, world” showing up all over the place, often used as a simple example or a test string. Hello World holds a special place in many programmers hearts because it is often used as a basic example to show syntax in coding languages. This practice was first popularized in 1978 by the book “The C Programming Language” where it was used as an example program. Nowadays, there is even “Time To Hello World” (TTHW) that is sometimes used to measure how complex a coding language can be. Languages with a lower TTHW are generally understood to be simpler, as it takes less time to get to a working state of “Hello, World”.
The world of open source is as expansive as it is diverse. There are thousands of small communities and niches that we may find ourselves becoming a part of, however it is important to remember those who came before us. Small bits left over from a forgotten age like foo bar, when there were no shortcuts or frameworks to abstract work. Everything we have started somewhere, and these terms not only come with values, but stories as well.
