[Stratoscope]

I'm 60 and have been programming for 44 years. This year I'm working on election maps for Google. I still like learning new languages - this year it's PostgreSQL and PostGIS, Go, Autohotkey (a very strange language!), and now TypeScript (not quite a new language).

One thing I get an odd pleasure out of is when other programmers use phrases and styles I came up with years ago. A recent example is the $ prefix on a JavaScript variable containing a jQuery object:

    // Set $test to a jQuery object and test to the DOM object
    var $test = $('#test'), test = $test[0];

I just saw someone explaining that on reddit last night and it gave me a smile.

Much longer ago, I coined the phrase "fire an event" back in the 80's when I was designing the VBX interface for Visual Basic (then called Ruby). Alas, not all the names I coined for that project survived: VB Controls were originally called Gizmos, which I thought was a much more fun name. But still it's neat to see people talk about firing an event.