EFFORTPOST [Effort] How one autist embarrassed an entire team of Microsoft programmers

Some background

When they're not busy designing pride flags the folx at Microsoft spend their time coding shitty software. Among these is the new Windows Terminal.

Casey Muratori is a programmer who, despite never releasing anything, clearly considers himself to be some kind of genius.

With that out of the way, here's the drama:

ACT 1: THE ISSUE

Frustrated with the slowness of Windows Terminal when printing colors, Casey submits a github issue. He even develops a benchmark application to accurately measure the speed.

After a bit of back and forth Casey starts to becomes frustrated:

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.

He receives this legendary response:

I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively. I am not aware of the body of work around performant GPU terminal emulation

Casey gets angry:

When we're at the stage when something that can be implemented in a weekend is described as "a doctoral research project", and then I am accused of "impugning the reader" for describing something as simple that is extremely simple, we're done. Consider the bug report closed.

After which a different Microsoft employee goes in on him:

You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope [what I linked] helps you understand that it's actually really darn hard.

Basically the whole team agrees that what is being asked of them is extremely difficult. While Casey is insistent that it's trivially simple.

So who is right? A team of senior engineers in a trillion dollar company or a reclusive game dev?

ACT 2: A WEEKEND PROJECT

Casey tweets the following:

I take back literally everything I said about Microsoft taking an interest in fixing their terminal.https://t.co/K9ojvy1liX

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) June 17, 2021

And, over the following weekend, he implements from scratch a terminal that works in the way he proposed. It's ~100x faster than Windows Terminal:

(video timestamped to the part with the pretty colors, although the rest is fun too)

Twitter thread with some juicy questions from the audiance

Then this happens:

Afterward, the same dev [lhecker] also used a fake name to hang out on our groomercord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there.

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022

ACT 3: MICROSOFT BENDS THE KNEE

Over the following months, there is an embarrassed silence from the Microsoft team. Eventually they release a blogpost basically admitting they were wrong, but don't mention Casey by name. Note that the person making the post is the one who snuck into Casey's groomercord.

Casey tweets:

When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided", being "somewhat combative" and am "impugning the reader". But a year later when they call the exact same thing "trivial", that is just, you know, them writing a blog post:https://t.co/AXrgZjvUPT pic.twitter.com/UTDrD9s0o6

— Casey Muratori (@cmuratori) May 6, 2022

And finally one of them makes a post on Hacker News seething about the whole thing. Quotes:

We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.

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Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it.

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I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? The blog post is matter-of-fact, and Casey is right: however, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?

Truly a new low for Microsoft.

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Want more nerd drama? See the previous post in this series.