Waldo JaquithPlease, please, stop using "foo" and "bar” in code documentation. Give us real examples that mean something. Not "if (foo > bar)," but “if (height > limit)." Not “foo++” but “counter++”. Give us a logical hook to hang our hat on, not nonsense words.
SwiftOnSecurity@waldoj I came across this one time in Wikipedia and it completely ruined the ability to understand what the hell they were talking about. Then I edited the article to use real words and it was immediately understandable
@SwiftOnSecurity Every time I read the jq manual, I get annoyed at how hard it is to follow for this reason. It's a great tool but its manual is really dragged down with all the foo/bar/baz nonsense. https://stedolan.github.io/jq/manual/#Basicfilters
LisPi@waldoj @SwiftOnSecurity It has never made things much worse for me, but I've never been particularly sure why it was a practice either.
Imbolc@lispi314 @waldoj @SwiftOnSecurity I have to say I am a bit baffled that people find the foo/bar convention to be confusing when used to document in a generic way. To me, it is just like the convention of using x in math.
The whole point is they are easy to recognize as things you need to replace.
However I realize some newer programmers consider this convention to be a kind of gate-keeping by us old-timers, and that would be bad. So maybe it is time to stop using our cherished foo and bar.
Alexander The 1st@eob @lispi314 @waldoj @SwiftOnSecurity I think the main confusion around foo/bar/baz convention is that although it tells you there are multiple variables and where they map to, it does *not* tell you what those variables could be beyond a possibly unclear typing (i.e. "Foo foo" is less descriptive than "Date foo", but..."Date foo" still doesn't tell me if it's earlier date, later date, or same date value).
@eob @lispi314 @waldoj @SwiftOnSecurity or perhaps TL:DR; All of the confusion of "i, j, k", none of the terseness.