I mean, there's a spectrum here. I don't think anybody is going to argue that that java.util.LinkedList shouldn't have tests. On the other end of the spectrum, there are things that obviously shouldn't be tested (getters and setters, whether some div has 10px of padding, etc). Tests are are how you lock down your software once it's ready to be frozen. You use them to turn software into hardware, to use an analogy from Steve Yegge [1].
I mostly write javascript all day, and I'm pretty sure that less than 0.01% of the javascript I've ever written is called often enough to make closure allocation time a serious concern. By all means, optimize if you're writing an inner loop body that gets called a million times per pageload, but I think most of us don't need to worry about it.
I often feel that it's necessary to stretch the truth a little bit on SO. Otherwise you ask "How can I do X?" and all your answers will be "Don't do X. Use Y instead."
Interesting, although a couple of these factors (wanting to just spend all day working on your passion instead of wearing many hats) don't seem inherently limited to designers. Programmers can have an appreciation for their craft as well!
We're working on solving these problems with new tools (flexbox in this particular case), but it takes time for those tools to become widely usable. You can look at e.g. Google's Polymer project for a glimpse at the vision for web programming in the future.
I quit caffeine and ended up regretting it. I felt tired a lot more, even a year later. Staying awake after lunch became a real challenge for me. I'm just saying this to temper the confirmation bias here - I think people who quit caffeine and got nothing out of it probably don't feel any particular need to share their stories.
You can live your life the way you want right up to the point where you want to visit your husband in the hospital or inherit the estate of your dead wife. Then these legal things start to matter.
Brute-forcing a 55-character password is a transcomputational problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcomputational_problem), i.e., it's impossible to accomplish using a computer the size of the earth within the expected lifetime of the earth. So I wouldn't worry too much about it.
I think it's a shame that you need to pay Apple $100/year to put a free game on their app store. It seems like some sort of special exception for open source apps would be reasonable.
My biggest hurdle with Meteor so far has been how hard it makes testing and test-driven development. Built-in testing support is pretty much absent from the core framework and has been marked a "post 1.0" feature on the roadmap. If you know your way around Node, you can kind of isolate out most of the global state that the framework uses and write unit tests, but it's pretty ugly (you can refer to my stack overflow question for a sample of the difficulties I've had: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15191257#15314384)
How about exposing an API for dev tools similar to the "swank" protocol that Emacs uses for editing Lisp code? I know there are people doing stuff like this already, but it would obviously be a lot easier if there were a nice protocol for it (ideally standardized across browsers...). I want to be able to seamlessly interact with a running Firefox instance from my editor or IDE, sending it snippets of code to evaluate and seeing my page change in real-time.
See also the "Unlicense" for something explicitly designed for source code: http://unlicense.org/. I find this preferable to something like the MIT license because it doesn't include the annoying requirement to include a copy of the license with the software, which is especially problematic for e.g. javascript libraries.
I might not understand the complaint here. I don't get paid royalties on the software I write either, because my employer owns the copyright to my work. That licensing arrangement suits both of us because I would like to collect a salary without assuming the risk that my work won't be profitable. It's not an exploitive relationship.
I'd be really curious to know which libraries, frameworks, or engines they intend to employ. Just yesterday I started learning the melonJS canvas game engine and it's been a lot of fun so far!
Great stuff. Meteor is getting more and more compelling as a platform. At this point, I'd seriously consider using it for a new project.
One thing I'd be slightly concerned about is the lack of a serious server-side rendering option, though. The "spiderable" package is a bit of a hack (as they themselves admit).
It's a shame that Twitter decided to roll their own solution to this problem instead of using schema.org or other existing semantic markup. I'd be interested in knowing what didn't work for them about the existing standards.
The fact that somebody would even consider comparing 10 years of progress to several thousand years implies that some pretty good stuff must have happened in the last decade.