Magic Strings

The term has no single inventor, extending the older concept of "magic numbers" — unnamed numeric literals embedded in code — to unnamed string values. The broader category of "anti-patterns" was formalised by Andrew Koenig in 1995 and codified in the influential 1998 book AntiPatterns by Brown, Malveau, McCormick, and Mowbray. Magic strings gained notoriety alongside object-oriented and scripting languages in the 1990s, in which strings as identifiers became ubiquitous and the cost of silent duplication errors became apparent.