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 youβre doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as βextremely simpleβ 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
β 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.
β 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
β 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.-
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.-
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.
Want more nerd drama? See the previous post in this series.
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Shit like this is why I wish I were a codecel.
Every programmer I meet is basically r-slurred.
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Software is the worst fricking field. Yeah, lots of, maybe even most programmers start out studying nonstop, more than 12 hours a day 7 days a week making sure they know the ins and outs of data structures and algorithms and pointers and so on. But inevitably they all reach a point where they're comfortable enough with their knowledge to stop challenging themselves and instead spend all day on groomercord or some online game, but they still think of themselves as that guy who works nonstop honing his craft, and they never spare an opportunity to remind you of it.
Any other industry I've worked in largely discourages this kind of chest puffing but programmers are so coddled (because they all pretend to be neurodivergent) none of them are used to being told to shut up, so this happens.
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Yeah pretend. I don't doubt that there's a good chunk of programmers who are neurodivergent, but there are just way too many of them that are totally normal in every respect except they're really annoying and poorly socialized.
If you tell me the last handful of people producing quality software are neurodivergent I'll believe you. If you tell me the guy who spends more time sneeding on twitter than he does programming has autism because it says so in his bio I'll only wonder why he's avoiding coding in order to talk to people.
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I know what you mean, I've met these programmers IRL
They were still using "introverted" as a crutch though, not autism.
DAE feel crushing despair picking up the phone? the world is so wrong for me and built by extroverts
not wanting to speak up to the cashier and feeling unfathomable dread at small talk and seething about it later is normal actually. Introvert things.
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Yes. "Introvert" fell out of favor when people realized claiming to have some diagnosable disorder (whether it was actually diagnosed or not) could just compel people to take you seriously under threat of losing their jobs. Plus it lets them commit as many mistakes as they want and still keep their enormous egos intact.
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I've seen a dumb video once where someone in the tech sector describes "masking" at work for aspies and I was bewildered
This person was acting like they had to consciously create a mask (?) as an aspie so they could function at work.
.... and it was literally just "be professional" instead of an butthole egomaniac. They acted like their discovery of intentional professionalism was a unique and amazing thing. Do they think other people aren't trying to actively be professional?
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most programmers are dogshit from day one and dont' push themselves nor have the ability to improve beyond a certain amount anyway.
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The key to success in life is admitting you are a dumbass and striving to improve yourself in the quest of not being a dumbass.
Note: You will never not be a dumbass.
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In chemistry and pharma the grind never ends
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It's the insecurity inherent to a field that is constantly trying to automate itself out of existence. No one can actually keep up with the latest tech and best practices for more than a sliver of the tools available but you're really supposed to pretend you know what all of the nonsense jargon other programmers are spouting means to not embarrass them and the people in charge of hiring and managing developers can't tell where the software their devs write ends and other software begins. It's like being a scribe in a society where only like 5% of people are literate enough to do anything beyond spell their names.
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Most programmers are fricking horrendous.
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So true king
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Just learn to code
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