Is it useful to use foo, bar, baz in examples?

[TiddlyTweeter]

@Springer

I should clarify that I’m not entirely averse to using foo, bar, and baz in appropriate circumstances. Among my many teaching roles over the years, one role that I enjoyed tremendously was teaching logic — and of course in logic the use of dummy predicates and dummy propositional variables is ubiquitous. Logicians, like programmers, deal regularly in semantically meaningless placeholders. These can be helpful in isolating abstract formal patterns without distraction.

You would be my kind of teacher.

[TiddlyTweeter]

@TW_Tones

@TiddlyTweeter

In the world of meta-syntactic variables Baz (='az) may be winning.

The English have a historical relationship to Australia, without going into the details, Baz, Bazza and Bruce are Sterio types used in humor that have aged poorly.

Right!

And that was my point.

The “foo-bar-baz” trio (FBB) has become as much as a cliché as disparaging UK comments on Aussies have become.

My point? People explaining code are still people.
Often it is RITUAL
It is rarely a value free act.
It is normally embedded in a social context.

IMO an Ethnomethdology would best provide a way to answer your socio-cultural OP.

TT

[TW_Tones]

The thing is if your writting is to be read by a broad audience you need to back it up with supporting details, as @EricShulman does, and this allows him to utilise metastatic variables and still be an effective communicator.

I personally think in this forum with a broad audience we would be better finding suitable metaphors and use real world language rather then metastatic variables that contain in them little or no information.

• Sure use metastatic variables if you want, but please keep the audience in mind.
• It is my view this tends to mean don’t use them.