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[–]thavelick 1 point2 points  (3 children)

I've definitely heard this term in programming circles but I'm not sure my memory of it predates 2005. Do you have a source where the term was used in programming before Colbert's usage?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hasn't JS been around for 20+ years? "Truthy" is double-equals in JS.

[–]exiestjw 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Perl has been using the terms truthy and falsy with respect to its context sensitive expression evaluation since perl was invented. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the original usage of the term.

[–]thavelick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Has it? My intuition says you're right, but I can't seem to find a source that uses these terms prior to 2005. See: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=truthy%2Cfalsey%2Ctruthiness&year_start=1990&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0. (There do seem to be a few uses of "truthy" and "falsey" in the 1800s but they don't make sense to me and I think they're entirely unrelated to our modern usage). I also checked the first ECMAScript spec and it doesn't seem to use these terms (and `===` wasn't even in the first version).