> That's because they lacked basic tools. Hackers in those days weren't getting much work done either.
Wat.
I grew up with ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, started programming in secondary school and while in high school watched as the Internet took over the world.
I was one of those hackers ;-)
Well if you're really going to go down that route, you should remember that the "unix philosophy" favours plain text as the data-passing mechanism. JSON itself does not have rules for how things like malformed UTF8 decoding should work, which means that every implementation of this JMAP protocol is going to need to refer to a specific JSON spec for starters, which is already destroying the credibility of the "simple" argument. Also, I don't see how your claims about hackers "in those days" has any basis other than speculation here.
Also known as the Unix philosophy ;-)
This isn't about comfort, but about doing what needs to be done.
Every webmail interface in existence has implemented their own half baked, proprietary protocol that does what JMAP is doing. Or do you think Google's Gmail web interface is using IMAP?
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> "hackers who were comfortable with open-ended bottom-up development"
That's because they lacked basic tools. Hackers in those days weren't getting much work done either.