> How is a yes/no question aggressive?

Have you stopped beating your wife?

More relevantly, when the question is asked genuinely then - as you say - it's expressing an openness to learn.

Sometimes it is asked rhetorically, dripping with sarcasm and derision. In that case, it is clearly not furthering our interest in productive, good-faith discussions.

Far more often, it falls somewhere between those two and - especially in text - is often ambiguous as to which was intended. While we should exercise charity and hope our conversational partners do likewise, it makes sense to understand when some phrases might be misconstrued and perhaps to edit accordingly.

I do get the sense that the "feel" in his writing eventually becomes more like "what are you guys smoking, this should be simple!"

It's not just "Am I missing something?"

It's:

"Am I missing something? Why is all this stuff with "runs of characters" happening at all? Why would you ever need to separate the background from the foreground for performance reasons? It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated."

Perhaps frustrated that they don't really seem to be on the same technical page?

I tend to think these things can go both ways. I feel pointing out someone's frustration in writing tends to make things worse. Personally I would just ignore it in this case.

There's a difference between "inherently difficult" and "difficult to update this software package". My reading of this thread is that the MS devs are saying this will take them a lot of effort to implement in this app, not that the new implementation could be simpler than the existing implementation. Asking to rearchitect the application is an involved process which would take a lot of back-and-forth to explain the tradeoffs. The new architecture can be simple, but evaluating a new architecture and moving to it are not.

There's a point at which you've moved from "fix this bug" or "evaluate this new component" to "justify the existing design" and "plan a re-architecture".

Whether or not you see his behavior as polite, I guess, is a matter of how you read people and the context of the situation. That said, he did literally admit he was being "terse". I think it was counterproductive at best and rather mean at worst.

As for whether it really is "difficult", one has to ask for whom? For someone that is intimately familiar with C++, DirectX, internationalization, the nature of production-grade terminal shell applications and all their features and requirements?

And even if it is "easy", so what? It just means Microsoft missed something and perhaps were kind of embarrassed, that's totally human, it happens. It's not so nice when this stuff is very public with harsh judgement all around.

This all rubs me the wrong way. I have found the Microsoft folks to be very helpful and generous with their attention on Github Issues. They've helped me and many others out, it has been genuinely refreshing. What this guy did might discourage participation and make folks more defensive to avoid losing face in a big public way over a mistake or silly gotch-ya.

Taking responsibility (which the developers later did by the way, even in this thread) and enduring abuse (which is also well documented here and elsewhere) should not be put on the same level.

More broadly, I'd much rather endure a slightly slow terminal made by developers acting in the open and in (mostly) good faith than the intentionally malicious software produced by actual bad actors within Google, Facebook, Microsoft et all..