On: Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

[ricardobayes]

Developer is a weird string choice though, why not Development or Code. It would be like MS naming its product VS Coder (lol)

[threeseed → ricardobayes]

It appears to be a relic from the NeXT days.

If you look at the video [1] you can see it installing developer tools into the NeXTDeveloper and NeXTLibrary folders. So it's quite possible Apple just did a find/replace and removed the prefix.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMh0WsLZZVY

[mattl → threeseed]

Earlier versions of Mac OS X would install the development tools in /Developer on the hard drive too.

[eddieroger → mattl]

Right - it was more like Utilities than Documents. A folder for a type of app that not every user needed, not for documented created for a purpose.

[eru → ricardobayes]

Compare: the Scheme language was supposed to be called Schemer, but filename length limitations back then prevailed.

[teddyh → eru]

As was Forth – it indended name was “Fourth”.

[anon20230209 → ricardobayes]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior

[grishka → ricardobayes]

Some older versions of Xcode installed themselves and SDKs and other developer tools into /Developer. All that stuff lives in /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer now.

[EugeneOZ → ricardobayes]

/usr is ok, so /Developer is also ok