Comment by makomk
4 years ago
In this case, the bug fixing is probably the lion's share of the work though - there's a huge amount of subtle edge cases involved in rendering text, and the Microsoft employees almost certainly know this. And the example that broke it isn't even something particularly obscure. We're literally talking about the output of the dir command, one of the first things someone is likely to do with a terminal window, not displaying correctly. He basically did the easy part of the work and lambasted some Microsoft employees as idiots because they thought it was more complex than that.
In Casey's defense (I'm ambivalent on this one), while the dir command itself isn't obscure, one could argue that using a no-op Unicode character as the digit group separator is an obscure case, at least for an American programmer. But I think your overall point still stands.