What? how? Its in almost every programming language that I can think of.

Many IDEs have an option to auto-insert it after typing a "{". This is on by default in Eclipse.

Exactly, and I'm a java programmer. For the record Sublime Text also inserts these for me. When I had to type '}' in the training program I actually had to look down at my keyboard!

Last night I learned that Microsoft Word 2010 will auto replace a ")" with a "}" if I type { stuff ).

Does anyone know when this feature was implemented in Word?

Must be fun for math people typing intervals that are semi-open.

What would the possible use for such a feature be? When in the world are non-programmers ever typing squiggly braces?

They're completely valid brackets to use in writing. You don't tend to see them much but using different forms of brackets can add clarity to nested brackets (i.e. when you feel the urge to expand on your text in brackets [which I frequently do {and according to Wikipedia, others do too}])

Thanks so much for this bit of knowledge, I was not aware this was the grammatically accepted means of doing this. I always tried to reformulate sentences to avoid nested "expressions" due to the confusing nesting of parenthesis.

Seems sensible enough. The editor just assumes that you want your thingies to match.

In my case, I was writing documentation for our product :P

Since it's being written on purpose as a 'product spec' like doc, company standards dictate that it be written in Word (unfortunately).

Yeah, that makes sense. I could foresee some cases where I was writing something documentation-y, such that it made sense to do in Word, but aimed at developers, such that I'd want to include code samples or the like.