What's foobar?

Everything is Foo Bar

A Silicon Valley guide to everything

by Joe Honton

A lighthearted look at our tech jargon.

Ivana struggled to make sense of it all. Every time she heard a coworker say, "just choose the right tool for the job," she was mystified. Until yesterday. That's when she discovered a clue at the Foo Bar, scribbled across the glass countertops in dry erase Sharpie.

Ivana discovered that the key to understanding tech jargon is simply to Google the term together with the phrase "everything is" , like this —


in Smalltalk everything is an object

in Pascal everything is an event


in Ruby everything is an expression

in Java everything is an interface


in Lisp everything is parenthesized

in Python everything is indented


in C everything is a byte

in C# everything is a class


in C++ everything is structured

in BASIC everything is spaghetti


in Eiffel everything is a contract

in Go everything is opinionated


in COBOL everything is CAPITALIZED

in Fortran "everything" is REAL


in Logo everything is a turtle

in PHP everything is an "elePHPant"


in Perl everything is a regular expression

in RegEx everything is /^(.*)$/


in TypeScript everything is typed

in JavaScript everything is prototyped


in RWServe everything is a plugin

in Express everything is middleware


in HTML everything is tagged

in CSS everything is declared


in Doppelmarks everything is double

in BluePhrase everything is shorthand


in SOAP everything is long winded

in REST everything is undocumented


in NoSQL everything is non-relational

in SQL everything is SELECT *


in GNU everything is a utility

in Bash everything is a one-liner


in Linux everything is a file

in Windows everything is a reboot


in TDD everything is a fail

in Jasmine everything is a mock


in Vue everything is reactive

in React everything is immutable


in Cryptography everything is a cipher

in IoT everything is a vulnerability


in Machine Learning everything is fuzzy

in AI everything is . . . coming next year


in Jira everything is a story

in Scrum everything is a sprint


in Docker everything is a container

in Kubernetes everything is orchestration


in DevOps everything is continuous

in Design everything is design


in Everything is Foo Bar "everything" is recursive

Everything is Foo Bar — A Silicon Valley guide to everything

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