Search code examples
ooptornado

What is a frob?

An Intro to Tornado book mentions a "frob object" and search engines are not being terribly yielding, so I hope this is a worthwhile question.

I'm seeing a lot of references to Flicker frobs and read that:

Etymology

It was adopted by the community of computer programmers which grew out of the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club in the 1950s, and allegedly among the oldest existing words in hacker jargon.

Noun

frob (plural frobs)

  1. (jargon, MIT) Any small device or object (usually hand-sized) which can be manipulated.

    Hand me that frob there, will you?

So in relation to application and web development, is a "frob object" just any small object that can be manipulated? For example:

class SomeFrob(object):
    holder = "something mutable"

frob = new SomeFrob

frob.holder = "mutated"
Solution

  • From what I can tell, they are just using the word Frob as a substitute or placeholder for a more specific name. The reason is that the name of the method or class isn't important, the concepts contained within are.

    This is the same as calling a class Foo or Bar. Now, as to why they use Frob instead of the extremely common name of Foo is beyond me.

    The only reference to Frob in the context of Tornado I can find is in a book titled Introduction to Tornado. So I wouldn't worry about it too much. The author likely just wanted to be a bit different.