BarCamp took its name from programmatic placeholder variables

Evidence

“Bar” was a joke: “foo” and “bar” are both metasyntactic variables that programmers use for placeholders. A few weeks later, Çelik, King, Chris Messina, Andy Smith, Matt Mullenweg, and Eris Free met at Ritual Roasters to plan the first BarCamp, which was held six days later. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 162

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the etymology of ‘BarCamp’ from the metasyntactic variables foo and bar.
• CANDY: A fun trivia nugget: the famous tech conference is named after a programmer placeholder joke.