Comment by amw-zero
4 years ago
And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.
4 years ago
And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.
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.
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.
But by any reasonable reading, the guy wasn't "slandered".
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?
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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?
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One non-sequiter deserves another. Just call his mother a cunt and move on.
Casey is in fact perpetually annoyed with and disdainful of microsoft. Anyone who is familiar with him knows this.
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.
The problem wasn't that the Microsoft devs were wrong technically. The problem was that the tone of the Microsoft developers got much worse than Cassey's tone, they should have just closed the bug rather than ridiculing him at the end. If they did that the issue wouldn't have been a big deal.
I've found people sometimes take a neutral tone, especially from someone (me for example!) who is sometimes more than a bit openly opinionated, as being passive aggressive (or passive condescending if that is a thing). Perhaps that is what has happened in this case?
For those curious, what was the outcome of this closed issue? Did Casey make a working terminal on Windows outside of a text renderer? Did Microsoft incorporate his feedback?
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.
Well given how absurdly big the difference is, and the main thing he did was render on demand instead of 7000fps I think he has a good reason to be condescending and they totally deserve it for wasting millions of people's time with this shit.
See also: the blinking cursor in Visual Studio Code.
Here's a thread on it with other examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014
They fixed it, but it was a sign of the times. Everything we've used over the decades had to be re-implemented for the web and stuff like Electron, and the people doing the implementing use such powerful machines that they don't even notice a simple blinking cursor devouring CPU or think about its impact on normal computers.
This! Developers at MS (edit: and elsewhere) should be forced to use their brainwork on low-end machines at least two days a week.
Or not - regardless of what MS employee claimed, Linux terminals performance is more than adequate.
Edit: I am speaking of Linux, not WSL, of course.
Yes, the open source volunteers and random employees deserve it. They are responsible for all of microsoft's many sins, and we should find them online and tell them they are trash tier developers until they learn their lesson, right?
Ok, sarcasm off. This attitude is utterly toxic. People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.
> People who are ignorant of how fast their software could be do not deserve abuse from strangers.
That's not the only valid way to frame the situation. At some level, professional software developers have a responsibility to be somewhat aware of the harm their currently-shipping code is doing.
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That said, there's only so much patience one can have...
condescending: having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority.
In this case he also demonstrated his superiority with working code.
Better to learn from it than to pout about it.