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Comment by lars | Hacker News Reader

I don't blame them. I had a go at implementing an IMAP server once, and it ranks as one of the most frustrating programming experiences I've ever had. The standard is huge, fragmented, and is full of strange requirements to fulfill every thinkable use case a client may have. These small details end up heavily dictating the architecture of your application. I don't see how could implement IMAP without completely throwing out most of your work several times.

To make things worse, there is hardly any way to know when you've done it right. I'm not even sure there is a right way. When you start looking at how actual email clients speak IMAP, you'll see that they all manage to ask for a list of emails in completely different ways. It's a small wonder that these systems appear to work at all.

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I think you can still blame them. They're a corporation with a 470B market cap, designing machines for which email is a primary use-case. They employ thousands and thousand of engineers. They should be able to build a mail client. Many much smaller organizations manage alright.

Agreed. How is Apple not to blame? If this article was about Gmail instead of Mail.app, every comment would definitely be blaming Google.

Yep.

What real innovation has there been on Mac OS X since Bertrand Serlet left?

Where are all the adult engineers?

I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps. They commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day. Nice people but they're second tier. They never critique Apple, think Apple is the best at everything, and shrug their shoulders at any technology developed outside of Apple. There's always an excuse for things that don't work, from broken iCloud APIs to Apple Maps.

They're competent engineers, they'll do what they are told, but they're not the mavericks who will break new ground. Just my opinion, but perhaps this is something other people have experienced.

EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

> commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day

Cupertino is part of the Bay Area. 1 Infinite Loop is just south of the Sunnyvale border and 280. About two miles from El Camino Real. If you're going to make stuff up, at least consult a map first.

> EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

South Bay, like East Bay, is a qualifier for a sub-region within the Bay Area. The peninsula is referred to as... the peninsula, not "the Bay Area". San Francisco specifically is either referred to as San Francisco, SF, or "the city". Santa Clara County is almost always referred to explicitly as such lest it be confused with the City of Santa Clara. When not speaking of governmental/political boundaries, one would more commonly say "Silicon Valley", "the valley", and sometimes its proper name of "Santa Clara Valley".

You have clearly spent little if any time in the bay area and are hardly qualified to make bigoted judgements about the caliber of engineers based on where they choose to live within it.

Rather than providing opinion about the quality of some of the engineers working at Apple, you're nit-picking about the semantics of the term "Bay Area" and how people use it (nobody in SF I know says they're taking the 101 to visit the "Bay Area", they say "South Bay").

Since I know these people, I know their work, I know from technical discussions the level they're at, I can legitimately form an opinion, and that is they are not great engineers, merely competent. More importantly, they tow the company line, they don't think outside the box, they are anything but mavericks.

Maybe Apple's software is suffering because the culture there means that engineers are too compliant or too scared to speak out and rock the boat?

> nobody in SF I know says they're taking the 101 to visit the "Bay Area", they say "South Bay"

Of course, that would be silly, since they're already in the Bay Area. I bet they don't say they're going to visit California, either. By the way, "the 101" is slightly unusual phrasing, too. Usually it's just "101".

Give it up. You have no idea what the bay area or anyone living in it is like, and it's obvious to everyone. You're the one who made this about geography. Don't get mad just because it exposed you as a fraud.

What a farce.

You've just shown there is nothing wrong with my statement "commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day" which you seem to have such a problem with.

Also with regards to:

> "the 101" is slightly unusual phrasing, too. Usually it's just "101".

Are you being serious?!!

One does not commute "from" a place to itself. You're trying to backpedal, but your chain is tangled in the English language's entrails.

It also makes no logical sense, as there would be no reason to mention where they commute from unless you thought it was of some significance, in which case you would want to be clear on where they are commuting from. Or are you now trying to insinuate that every engineer in the Bay Area (now that you've reversed your position and agreed the term is not limited to the peninsula), including Cupertino, is mediocre by virtue of being there, rather than only those engineers from the immediate San Francisco area?

> Are you being serious?!!

Deadly.

At the end of the day, the engineers that I personally know who contract at Apple are competent but not great. They happen to commute. The two are not related. There is no insinuation in the original post that all engineers who commute are mediocre.

I am however insinuating that the culture at Apple may have changed, which allows merely competent engineers to be hired in the first place, while great engineers like Bertand Serlet leave the company, to the detriment of OS X.

As for the 101, you must be trolling...

>EDIT: To poster below, with regards to the Bay Area which covers a large geographic region, I'm talking about the San Francisco peninsula area. Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

The term "Bay Area" has always referred to the nine counties touching SF Bay, and thus includes all of Santa Clara county. I've never heard your definition of "Bay Area" before, and I grew up in San Jose.

The area you're referring to is generally called "The Peninsula".

Rest assured, my definition of "Bay Area" is the same as yours.

One poster, for whatever reason, didn't like me using the phrase "commute to Cupertino from the Bay Area every day".

My Edit to that poster should have been clearer, but all I'm saying is that people I know describe themselves as going to "South Bay" when referring to their commute from the Peninsula to Cupertino, to distinguish the subregion from the whole region.

> Amongst people I know, Cupertino (which is in Santa Clara) is generally referred to as being in South Bay rather than the Bay Area.

People you know are delusional. The "Bay Area" includes the peninsula, south bay, east bay, and north bay. Some people throw in Santa Cruz, which might be a bit extreme, but I've never talked to anyone who lived there for an appreciable time period and didn't include Silicon Valley (and hence Cupertino).

> I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps.

You've met a couple of employees (or maybe contractors?), and you believe that they are representative of thousands of technical staff? That says far more about you than it does about anything else.

As someone who lives in the land of trees and windows (and grew up in the land of the freeway) I count Santa Cruz as part of the Bay Area, there are enough commuters running up and down CA-17 to make it count.

I met a person in San Jose who told me they were from the city, and I asked "Oh nice, me too! Which part are you from?" He named some unheard of district, and I kept asking questions to try to pinpoint where it was, and I found out he was actually from Palo Alto. That's extreme.

That's beyond extreme. I suppose that Palo Alto is formally a City, but ...

People in San Francisco who are going on the commute on the 101 don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area today" - they say "I'm going to South Bay today".

People always orient around themselves. People living in Cupertino or Mountainview might say they live in the "Bay Area" but for people living further North in San Francisco or Oakland, they would consider themselves to be living in the "Bay Area" and folk further South to be living in the "South Bay".

This is just semantics.

> People in San Francisco who are going on the commute on the 101 don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area today" - they say "I'm going to South Bay today".

Of course not; they're already in the Bay Area. People in Palo Alto don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area" when they drive to SF, and people on the Upper West Side don't say "I'm going to New York today" when they take the A train downtown, either. I honestly can't tell whether or not you're trolling, at this point.

Actually I thought you were trolling by saying people I know are delusional because they refer to Cupertino as being in South Bay (which is obviously just a subregion of the Bay Area). Another poster is getting upset because I wrote "the 101" instead of "101". Christ.

With regards to your other point, no, of course I don't think all Apple engineers are second tier, but I do feel that since Bertrand Serlet left, OS X engineering has languished.

Given that I know some competent - but not great - engineers who work at Apple (and they happen to commute) I wonder if the culture at Apple today is more about hiring competent engineers to implement a roadmap, rather than hiring great engineers and letting them loose to "think different".

None of us objected to you saying that people refer to Cupertino as being in the South Bay. What we objected to was the second half of that sentence: "... rather than the Bay Area." As written, this implies that the people in question believe that the South Bay is not part of the Bay Area, which is delusional. Maybe you didn't intend to say that, but that's what you wrote, and what everyone responded to.

Regarding "great" vs. "competent" engineers: every company needs a mix of them. There aren't enough truly great engineers for even just Apple or Google to be entirely staffed by them, much less all of the other companies out there. So everyone needs to make do with merely competent engineers in some roles.

You mentioned in a sibling comment that the engineers in question "contract at Apple"; here you wonder if Apple is merely "hiring competent engineers to implement a roadmap". But that's exactly what all companies hire contractors for, whereas great engineers who are "let loose to think different" are typically permanent employees.

You're right, there aren't enough great engineers out there. I'm just wondering if the direction of the company is an impediment to hiring the best.

Check out the reviews of Pages 5, which has been dumbed down. If the vision and future for OS X is to turn it into a Fisher Price OS for the masses, I can see why a great engineer would prefer to work elsewhere and tackle bigger challenges.

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2013/10/23/iwork-13-a-huge-regression...

http://www.betalogue.com/2013/10/24/pages-5-disaster/

It's the bay area, but we break it up into South bay, and East bay to easily pinpoint the location we are referring to. "She's from somewhere in the East bay", but it's still the bay area; But you don't use it in the following way, "I'm going to the South bay". You would just say, "I'm going to Cupertino/Ssn Jose/etc..." If you're referring to San Francisco, you would just say the city or San Francisco. If you say "frisko", everyone would know you're not from San Francisco.

But implementing an IMAP client is vastly easier. Still frustrating, and the IMAP spec is a giant stinking turd, but most of the most horrific things in implementing an IMAP server is down to all the crap you need to support in case some weird client uses it (and one inevitably does), while a client can choose to stick to a very small subset of the spec.

It may seem that a client implementation is vastly easier, but that is an illusion. Some of the complexity arises from the way IMAP imposes no specific naming model for mailboxes, so the client has to be prepared for that. But most of the complexity comes from dealing with offline operation and attendant state synchronization in a way that isn't horrendously inefficient.

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