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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

I think the comment below in the github thread sums up the attitude of the developer. It's definitely not a "neutral" attitude. It's somewhat chip-on-shoulder and somewhat aggressive.

  > 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.

But by any reasonable reading, the guy wasn't "slandered".

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Man, if we start taking issue with "Am I missing something?", how can we have productive, good-faith discussions? The only attitude I can associate with that is openness to learn, a genuine curiosity.

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?

> 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.

If you're going to read emotional content into that "Am I missing something?", I think sarcasm and derision are not the most plausible options. In this case, it seems like incredulity is the more likely and appropriate reaction: because it seemed like the person asking the question was putting a lot more thought and effort into the discussion than the Microsoft developers who were not willing to seriously reconsider their off-the-cuff assumptions.

Oh, I didn't mean that sarcasm and derision is how the Microsoft developers interpreted the phrase. I was speaking to the notion that the question was necessarily innocent and could only be interpreted thusly.

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.

"Feigned incredulity" can be every bit as caustic as outright hostility.

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.

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.

That exact case seem a very appropriate scenario for clarifying? Microsoft kept saying something was difficult, whilst Casey knew that it was not, so really he was being polite by first confirming that there wasn't something he'd overlooked?

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.

Some people prefer to communicate with less words? This is an issue that crops up often with different cultures working on a single issue.

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?

1. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362

One non-sequiter deserves another. Just call his mother a cunt and move on.

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