It would be interesting to know what other ways to drive App downloads people are using. Obviously ASO is important, but what Ad services do you use and what is your experience with those?
Tools like (trace ...) in Lisp are helpful, but most of the time you want an actual debugger. If you are using Eclipse as your Clojure IDE, the plugin Counterclockwise integrates with the usual Eclipse debugger and let's you do all the usual things:
Lots of people follow the newest trend. The same thing happened with the web in the early days. Everybody (person, company, entity) wanted a website. They didn't know why, who would use it and what for, but they said all their clients/customers/friends were asking for it. The same thing is happening now with mobile.
As time progresses, people will get a better understanding of who uses mobile, when and for what and will adapt development of mobile apps accordingly.
Thanks for doing these extensive benchmarking tests. It would be really helpful to see a more complex example that includes user authentication. Aside from the benchmarks it's also a really good starting point to compare the code in different languages and get a first impression of a framework.
On a side-note, I'd really like to know why so few start-ups seem to be using Spring. It could be just a wrong impression . But from what I have seen most start-ups use RoR or Django. My guess is that Spring is less flexible and less known outside big companies, where it is usually the default. It could also be that Spring works better with the waterfall model whereas Django or RoR are better suited for explorative programming and that fits the respective spheres better.
According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia has more traffic than Amazon.com. You said Wikipedia raised $25 million last year. Amazon had over $60 Billion in revenue last year. Obviously Wikipedia is a not-for-profit organization and that's good. Just saying that compared to their user base, they are not making a lot of revenue.
Since I got my degree in Germany, things are slightly different, but it seems to me like the premises of the situation are very similar. During and after high-school I worked as a web dev for a small compnay and did some projects on the side. At the time the only college degree you could go for was a "Diplom", which is a 5 year program and qualifies you for PhD studies - or just keep working and making very good money at the time.
After having done web development - I'm talking front-end stuff here: HTML, JavaScript, CSS and simple business logic stuff with ColdFusion/Perl/PHP and MySQL - I wanted to move on to more interesting things. And that's what the degree allowed me to do. I qualified the kind of web development I did, because there are some very interesting fields on the server side when it comes to scaling things, but I can see how the front-end technologies get boring.
It certainly depends on what courses you are going to take. But if your aim is to get a deeper understanding of more complex problems, I suggest you go for it and apply that rule to the courses you are going to take. Personally I did mainly machine learning and compilers and worked at the chair for distributed systems.
So what has this gotten me? Well, that depends on the way you look at it, but together with my co-founder I'm working on a startup that analyzes location information and motion detection to track user behavior. It's interesting, technically challenging, not a lot of other folks work in this area and we might even make money with it ;)