True!

There was that bit a few years back where the HN folk saw Satya as the second coming of Microsoft and anything even slightly critical or suspicious of Microsoft was downvoted to oblivion as highly implausible. I think people are still coming down from that high.

He's not the messiah, he's a naughty businessman!

(Note: I shot my HN account then because the majority of the MS stuff on here was utterly intolerable for many of us who have been MS devs/users since day zero and have the mental scarring)

Edit: remind me to post this when MS staff are still asleep next time...

This. LSP is a great example of something that also takes a while to flesh out because the problem space spans a lot (syntax, autocomplete, etc.)

Do you have any links or resources you could direct me toward that were more helpful than Microsoft's basic how-to pages for learning VS Code plugin development? I attempted to build a VS Code extension, but the attempt fizzled out. I managed to make some progress in creating the simplest of UI elements and populating them. I'm particularly interested in building a GUI-based editor of JSON / YAML where a user can select a value from a prepopulated dropdown menu, or validating a JSON / YAML file against a custom schema. Any help or advice you could provide would be appreciated!

> What's the harm here if the APIs are temporary

The “if” is carrying a lot of weight.

It gives Microsoft a solid competitive edge and a form of vendor lock-in in their otherwise mostly open product.

We don’t know that they’ll be temporary forever.

> They've stated the purpose of these "proposed APIs"

Just like how they said recall would not be a required feature, but is a dependency of the file explorer in the next version of windows?

Microsoft will say whatever looks good for them, obviously.

> last decade

But we do from the last 11+ years ;)

I’d always err on the side of not trusting giant monopolistic corporations with a history of garnering good will to cash in on it later.

Especially when that company has been very aggressively inserting itself in nearly every JS projects dependency/software delivery pipelines.

I gain nothing by trusting them, but I stand to lose my project’s independence from them.

The harm is that third-party developers aren't allowed to publish extensions that use "proposed APIs", but Copilot doesn't have to follow these rules because Microsoft both develops the extension and runs the Extension Marketplace website. Microsoft is therefore able to add functionality to their extension that third-party developers can only add by forking VS Code. VS Code forks lose access to the Extension Marketplace, and many Microsoft-published extensions (such as Pylance and LiveShare) will only run on official Microsoft builds of VS Code, not forks.

IE had over 50% market share for over 10 years. It was likely a major factor for Windows holding the desktop OS monopoly.