A customer recently asked me to look into a program that used to run in 5 minutes but now took 1 to 4 hours. It's used by thousands of people all over the world all day long.

It iterated through an array doing 3 SQL SELECTs against non-indexed files for each element. There used to be about 50 elements in the array; now there were more than 5000. I rewrote the whole thing in one day to do a total of 4 SELECTs and run in 12 seconds.

But it took 6 days to get through QA (while the users continued to suffer). QA's biggest complaint? I indented 4 spaces instead of the (unpublished) standard of 5 spaces.

Of all the things I have to deal with, nothing pisses me off more. Software QA is becoming more and more like TSA security at the airport: illogical, and obviously so. Last year, flagrantly unacceptable code was promoted without question while its replacement was held up on a meaningless detail.

I got the feeling from the programmer's quotes in this essay that the same thing is happening at the app store.

We programmers are a funny lot. Make us struggle for business or technical reasons and we adapt beautifully. Make us struggle for something stupid and we just get pissed off and do something else. What a pity.

Talk about it. I just got a rejection today for a major bugfix on my last update. The only change in the update is to use utf-8 encoding---one tiny change on one line of code. After 2 weeks, they tell me they can't approve the update because I'm using undocumented APIs in a couple places. Sure, OK, looks like I was using some methods that went from deprecated to undocumented... but that's exactly what's in the store right now... ugh. Meanwhile, users are, rightfully, pissed-off.

I'd say about 50% of the time my submissions get rejected, and always for a stupid reason like this; this is one of the better ones, actually. Will I stop developing? Probably not, because it's good money. But am I seriously considering moving to Android? You bet.

Part of Paul's reasoning depends on Apps being central to the iPhone experience the same way software is central to the desktop experience. I'm not totally sure this is the case. While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption? With the exception of games, how many killer iPhone apps are there that don't already ship with the phone? The phone shipped for an entire year without an App Store at all. I even read something not that long ago that said the majority of apps sit unused on people's phones after they get them.

Now, this doesn't mean that developers won't want a developer friendly phone, or that Apple is hurting their reputation with developers. I'm certain it has been frustrating to deal with the whole process. However, if 3rd party software isn't essential for the iPhone as a platform, then developer satisfaction moves down a bit in terms of importance in Apple's eyes.

Now, it's clear that games are major for the app store. Games are also a special class of software application that benefits disproportionately from having access to the hardware at a low level. They also have properties more similar to music and movies (incidentally, things the iTunes store is good at selling). Except for the simplest games, they require a lot of up-front design work and investment. It's rare that a released game goes through a ton of rapid iterations to "get it right". Games may still have bugs after release, but in general the functionality they are going to have is there on day one. They also ship with the final sound effects, music, artwork, etc... Games are also probably very unlikely to "duplicate existing functinoality" or any of the other cases where "normal" apps hit barriers. Perhaps Apple has (intentionally or unintentionally) created an environment optimized for game approval?

I'm certainly not defending the app store process, but I just wonder if the software development community has a disproportionate view of its importance to the iPhone as a whole.

Actually as acquisitions go this was a pretty good one. Much better than Yahoo's acquisition of Delicious, which basically destroyed it. Reddit continued to grow after the acquisition. Steve and Alexis worked for CN for several years, and as far as I know there was no bad blood when they left. Maybe CN could be making more money from it (I have no idea how much they do make), but I think they've learned a lot about how "social media" works, and it always seemed that was their main goal.

If you boil this article down to the actual facts reported in it, it's nothing more than: The founders of a startup bought by a big company eventually quit. But that's the norm with acquisitions. It's ridiculous (or more precisely, linkbait) to call it a "divorce."

Interesting to see this get linked to - this was a little hack that I did back in 2006 and haven't touched it since.

In short it was an experiment to develop an alternative syntax to jQuery (I've always felt that jQuery's syntax and idioms are very much like a domain-specific language for traversing and manipulating the DOM). One of my primary reasons for creating jQuery was to develop a library that had very little syntactical overhead. This jQuery^2 experiment was trying to take it to the next extreme (almost no syntax, just some whitespace). To do this I built a very-hacky parser and search through the page for scripts that have a type of "text/jquery".

You'll note that the script that runs the page is actually in this meta-language. Also note that the code in the textarea compiles to some nonsense that doesn't actually run on that page. I was mostly just throwing in code to test the parser.

Projects like Cappuccino have taken this idea to the extreme and developed complete languages on top of JavaScript that are much more functional than what I present here.

Glad people are finding it to be interesting, though!

A lot more than one. The App Store is tied with US immigration as the biggest source of complaints I hear from founders.

I have loved all of the okcupid linkbait.

Much of it conforms to the old wives tales or intuitions of people, but "The women who are subjectively rated the most attractive get disproportionately less attention from men. No, really, we're not making it up, we can demonstrate this with SQL" is a whole lot more fascinating than the equivalent finding justified by, ahem, wild speculation. (Or its close cousin, "We surveyed 18 men and 22 women who happened to be enrolled in psych 101 at this campus! Sweet, sweet empiricism!")