[philbo]

This bit surprised me somewhat:

'Not only had we gotten very used to calling it that, the string “Alexander” was all over the code and buried in its resources. So the engineering team wasn’t just curious about the real name, they were worried about correctly and completely changing the placeholder name at the last minute.'

Why would you litter a codebase with disparate string literals referring to a "placeholder name" rather than using a single resource file or a single #define?

[bdash]

Resources such as nib files and help files aren't amenable to things like #defines. Filenames and build system metadata fall in to the same cateogry. The source code proper is a different story, but is also trivially updateable via sed or the like.

[bni]

What makes you think it was string literals? Probably a lot of classes was prefixed with "Alex" or something similar. Folks at Apple, being perfectionists, of course could not live with the code name all over the source :-)