Quick question if Sift is hanging out in these threads: Why would you use $val arguments in your JSON API? It seems like nearly any other symbol would have been

Quick question if Sift is hanging out in these threads: Why would you use $val arguments in your JSON API? It seems like nearly any other symbol would have been a better choice, since PHP, Ruby, Perl and others use $ in string interpolation. Yes, developers should be smarter about escaping and using string values, but this seems like a very easy thing to get wrong.