Hanging single quotation marks? You mean the ‘prime’ symbol? This comes up a lot in math to generate more variables that need a similar name—that’s why it ends up in Haskell and related languages. It’s not something weird.
Granted the ASCII tick/apostrophe is neither the proper symbol for primes nor quotation marks (should be curly), but programmers are reluctant towards Unicode.
Though I'd recommend a youtube channel called 'Low Level Javascript' (really!) which comes close in developing some of their parser combinator library.