Where? He started completely neutral here:
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
We live in a time where every competent developer is slandered in public if he isn't fully submissive to the great corporate powers.
> Setting the technical merits of your suggestion aside though: peppering your comments with clauses like “it’s that simple” or “extremely simple” and, somewhat unexpectedly “am I missing something?” can be read as impugning the reader. Some folks may be a little put off by your style here. I certainly am, but I am still trying to process exactly why that is.
How is a yes/no question aggressive? At that point the maintainers had two possible responses:
1. Yes you are missing that ...
2. No that is the complete picture.
But they chose to side channel to a third possibility, "we are put-off by your questioning!". Excuse me what?
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 would say that incredulity falls within the range between "completely inoffensive" and "outright hostile", and very much toward the former side of the scale. It can be hard to distinguish from feigned incredulity, which (while still far from "sarcastic and derisive") makes its way toward the other side somewhat.
It's all a matter of perception and context, of course. And though you say there's only one way to interpret it, even you describe it as a continuum.
Sadly, this is all just a sad missed opportunity.
MS could have been less defensive and more open to possible solutions. The genius programmer could have slowed his roll a bit and could have been more collaborative.
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 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".
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.
As for difficult, the context is very much set from it being a Github Issue on their own repo, meaning there is a certain assumption of skill.
You're cutting Microsoft a lot of slack here, and it feels like you're forgetting that out of this whole transaction MS end up with free labour and bug-fixes? They choose for the setting to be very public, and they choose to let their employee's directly reply to customers with quotes like[1]: ["I will take your terse response as accepting the summary.", "somewhat combatively", "peppering your comments with clauses like", "impugning the reader."]. All of which are corporate-passive-aggression and (in my mind) are vastly more antagonistic than Casey ever was?
He's been like this for years, and that's fine when you are hanging out with you buddies over a beer, but now Casey is a public figure.
Being a public figure means you are not 'every competent developer'. The reason this was made so public wasn't ms employees, it was Casey's followers.
The sequence of events he started here ended with his fans and friends on discord feeling justified (because Casey, not them, was right on a technical level) brigading volunteers and microsoft employees alike until at least one of them quit open source.
A truly ugly conclusion that could have been avoided with a more circumspect approach.
My worry is that Casey did this technical performance for the benefit of his followers, and nothing of value was gained, except of course Casey's growing fame.