Comment by gnustop
4 years ago
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?
> 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.
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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.
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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.