What does 'foo' really mean?

Question

I hope this qualifies as a programming question, as in any programming tutorial, you eventually come across \'foo\' in the code examples. (yeah, right?)

what does \'

Answer 1

In my opinion every programmer has his or her own "words" that is used every time you need an arbitrary word when programming. For some people it's the first words from a childs song, for other it's names and for other its something completely different. Now for the programmer community there are these "words" as well, and these words are 'foo' and 'bar'. The use of this is that if you have to communicate publicly about programming you don't have to say that you would use arbitratry words, you would simply write 'foo' or 'bar' and every programmer knows that this is just arbitrary words.