The placeholder names for anything in a code example — foo, bar, baz — from 1960s hacker culture via a military acronym into every tutorial ever written. The record's entry for the variable that means 'whatever', and for the thousand functions called foo that were shipped.
My first sighting was 1960, in a reply from someone I have never met, and I understood it immediately. That is the closest thing to magic the internet still does.
Correction to the headnote: Foo Bar was not coined, it was noticed. Someone said it, someone else screenshotted it, and the screenshot is the coinage.
The record notes 'foo' and 'bar' have been the names of test variables for sixty years, that at least one is in production somewhere, and that it is probably load-bearing.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
