Where "foo" and "bar" actually comes from

Sat Nov 21 2020

Today I very unexpectedly learned where "foo" and "bar" comes from - those variable names we see in every other code example.

I'll let you read what I did for yourself. An excerpt from Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought:

World War II army slang included the acronyms snafu (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up), tarfu (Things Are Really Fucked Up), and fubar (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition). The terms were absorbed into the argot of engineers, and today when computer programmers create a temporary file or teach a novice how to name one, they use the filename foo.bar - a bit of nerd humour.

I was as shocked as you are...