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>Given that I wasn't aware of this issue before reading this email shows that it's probably not much of an issue in practice Two economists walk down a road. O
by ses1984 8y ago
>Given that I wasn't aware of this issue before reading this email shows that it's probably not much of an issue in practice
Two economists walk down a road. One of them says, "look, a $20 bill on the ground."
The other one says, "that's impossible, if there was money on the ground, someone would have picked it up already."
- simias 8y agoI don't understand how that applies to what I was saying. I was commenting that it's not an issue that crops up often in practice, which is probably why the engineers at GMail made the assumption that it could reasonably be ignored. I'm not saying that it can never be an issue (this it obviously is in this case), I'm saying that it's not necessarily a bad engineering decision. Adding code to handle weird corner cases of a standard means adding code that won't be used 99.999% of the time (a number I pulled freshly out of my buttocks, but wouldn't be surprised if it was close to the truth in this case), that's more likely to rot, be poorly tested and become a maintenance liability. I'm not saying people never find $20 bills on the ground, I'm saying that if most people routinely found $20 bills on the ground every other day we'd probably have heard about it by now. The fact that it only came to my attention in this email (and I hosts my own email server and have written SMTP clients and server code in the past) tells me that it's probably not such a widespread problem. If GMail started routinely bouncing incoming mail because they didn't support the standards correctly I'm sure we'd see an article or ten pop up on the front page of HN.
- ses1984 8y agoMaybe you're right. I just like that joke.