Metasyntactic Variables

Here's a question I bet you've never asked yourself - why do we use foo and bar when whiteboarding a problem? These terms actually have a name - metasyntactic variables! We use them when we need to express function logic outside of direct context or application. But why those terms that we see all over the place? Great question, the answer to which, as best I can tell, is a big shrug. It's just what you use. They makes sense if you take a second to think about it - you generally only ever need a few terms to describe a digestable snippet of code, and it's fine to reuse these when moving from one situtation to the next.

We can just use single characters like a, b, c and so on, but 3 characters tends to be the right amount to be able to clearly discern a variable at a glance, as well as being closer to the length of variable names used in real applications.

// this is a bit hard to read at a glance
function (a, b, c) {
  const d = getSomething();
  const e = a + b;
  return e;
}

// this is easier to read quickly
function (foo, bar, baz) {
  const qux = getSomething();
  const quuz = foo + bar;
  return quuz;
}

Python

If you come from a Python background, you may be used to the metasyntactic variables recommended by the creator:

• spam
• ham
• eggs

If you didn't know, Python is in fact named after the British comedy group formed in the 60s, perhaps best known for their comedies of the same name (Monty Python et. al).

More Than Just foo and bar

What if you're mocking out a more complex problem and you need more than just a few placeholder variable names? Well here's a list you can pull from (courtesy of @substack on GitHub):

• foo
• bar
• baz
• qux
• quux
• corge
• grault
• garply
• waldo
• fred
• plugh
• xyzzy
• thud

RFC3092

Though many are fine with just shrugging and accepting that these variable names are no more than a product of the swirling pool of those who came before us, there has been some effort put into codifying them. IETF RFC3092 took note of the fact that many previous RFCs "contain[ed] the terms foo, bar, or foobar as metasyntactic variables without any proper explanation or definition" and made an effort to categorize them in an official manner. It's definitely worth a read if you have some downtime.