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It takes a PhD to develop that

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Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#181

Post by ZeroGravitas »

incrudible wrote: post #149
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #135

I tihnk I generally agree with this, but also wonder what the alternative is. If you step outside your own industry, do you want plumbers that have a hobbiest appreciation of the intricacies of fluid dynamics, or do you want someone to come and unblock your toilet in the middle of the night? There's possibly a middle ground where the geniuses invent toilet technology in such a way that it is easy to install and maint…

I just want Microsoft to develop a proper terminal application and not handwave away complaints about performance with "that's a PhD right there". Even if it was a PhD, I'd then expect a PhD to be put to the task, because this is a crucial component of the operating system. Realistically though, a PhD is the opposite of what you want here. A PhD is almost by definition an inexperienced programmer. It's also someone w…

I was more responding to the article, which used that specific example as a jumping off point to talk about management structure in software development generally.

I don't use Windows, but I do use Kitty terminal (https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/) and from my interactions with that project and trying to get code ligatures working in my setup I've learned that terminals are really complex, both for technical and legacy/ecosystem reasons so my gut reaction is to support the MS engineers, without having read deeply into that specific issue.

edit: having read some more of the original ticket, I'm more firmly on the MS developers side. I think the other person is both rude and uninformed about what they are talking about, which is a terrible combination.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#182

Post by onion2k »

vermilingua wrote: post #179
mwcampbell wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the GP's chosen font work correctly in Windows Terminal, though? If so, then that proves that there is indeed more to a fully functional terminal renderer than refterm covers.

This is some schoolyard level stuff right here. The GP isn't using a monospaced font. Who, in the history of terminal emulators, has wanted to use a non-monospaced font in their terminal?

This is exactly the sort of "we can just skip that feature to make it faster!" edge case that I was talking about in my post.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#183

Post by j_barbossa »

jiggawatts wrote: post #20
onion2k wrote: post #7

A few hours later another programmer came up with the prototype of a much faster terminal renderer, proving that for an experienced programmer a terminal renderer is a fun weekend project and far away from being a multiyear long research undertaking. I have no idea if this is the case here, and I suspect it might not be, but pretty much every time I've seen a developer complain that something is slow and then 'prove'…

This particular case was discussed at length on Reddit and on YC News. The general consensus was that the Microsoft developers simply didn't have performance in the vocabulary, and couldn't fathom it being a solvable problem despite having a trivial scenario on their hands with no complexity to it at all. The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] an…

A pretty one sided view. I use Windows terminal because it supports multiple tabs - multiple cmds and some WSL bashes.

I don't care at all if this or that terminal uses a bit more RAM or is a few milliseconds faster.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#184

Post by Aeolun »

joshuamorton wrote: post #89
zohch wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So have you met any good leaders? I have met people who lead well, but I have not met anyone who's job it was to be a leader that lead well. > Or are you saying that good leaders are nearly impossible to find (and therefore perhaps the job is difficult?) It's almost impossible to find someone that has a job of being a leader that is good leader. The job being difficult does not explain why the worst possible people…

What is good leadership, in your opinion? What makes someone's job a "leader" job, do you mean management only, or technical leadership roles as well? What is a leaders job? When you say that "leadership is feckless", do you mean the leaders you've encountered, or that having a role of official leadership or hierarchy is irresponsible or negative?

If leadership does not stand in the way of delivering the product, lets the devs make their own decisions, and can get the organisation above them to go along with this, they’re good leaders in my opinion.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#185

Post by mytailorisrich »

Someone wrote: post #172
mytailorisrich wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code because (a) it’s GPLv2 One thing to remember is that it is always possible and acceptable to contact the author of a GPL-licensed piece of code to enquire whether they would consider granting you a commercial license. It may not be worthwhile but if you find exactly what you're looking for and that would take you months to develop yourself then it may very well be.

Not always. GPL-licensed do not have to have a “ the author”. There may be hundreds of copyright holders involved (IIRC, ¿Netscape? spent years looking for people that had to agree when it planned to change their license and rewriting parts written by people who didn’t)

Sure, 'the author' may be a number of people collectively, and in that case it's probably not worth bothering.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#186

Post by imcotton »

The very ticket [1] is locked by this epic ending:

> You were overly confident in your opinion, but I hope this website helps you understand that it's actually really damn hard.

> The reason your program shows a high FPS under other terminal emulators is simply, because their rendering pipeline works independent of VT ingestion. Gnome Terminal is not laying out text faster than your display refresh rate either. And of course, again, this is something WT will probably do as well in the future... but this project is nowhere near as old as Gnome Terminal is.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#187

Post by vermilingua »

onion2k wrote: post #182
vermilingua wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some schoolyard level stuff right here. The GP isn't using a monospaced font. Who, in the history of terminal emulators, has wanted to use a non-monospaced font in their terminal?

This is exactly the sort of "we can just skip that feature to make it faster!" edge case that I was talking about in my post.

But it isn't an edge case! It's not an edge case, if it isn't a use case!

This is an edge case as much as building a rasterizer directly into the terminal is an "edge case".

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#188

Post by maficious »

makomk wrote: post #178
maficious wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refterm is a not a full-featured terminal in terms of configurability, but it has all the features needed for rendering. Configuration like: choosing fonts, choosing colors, tabs, whatever, it's misc. features, which are unrelated to rendering. The case here is about rendering and it's exactly what is shite in every terminal emulator. I don't understand why everyone is arguing about it anyway. Refterm provides a fix,…

The fact that Casey Muratori's proposed approach requires the terminal to reimplement the process of correctly mapping characters to glyphs - including stuff like fallbacks to other fonts - is a huge part of the argument for why it's much harder to implement and more complicated than he claims. If it really doesn't do that right for something as simple as a decimal seperator for the font some random HN commenter happ…

The "font some random HN commenter happened to use" is some f****** proportional Calibri. I want to see someone use it in any terminal emulator. Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code, but, fair enough, it doesn't have fallback yet.

Its' description says also: "Reference monospace terminal renderer". "monospace" is there for a reason.

It's worth mentioning though, that Windows Terminal also defaults to Cascadia Code and Cascadia Code was installed automatically on my machine, so it's de-facto the new monospace standard font on Windows starting from 10.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#189

Post by avereveard »

maficious wrote: post #140
avereveard wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just launched "dir" https://i.imgur.com/lkbOR3i.png can't even print properly the decimal separator. maybe it wasn't that easy.

The font, m8, the font. Use monospcae font and it works like a charm.

I haven't changed anything, just downloaded and launched, that's the result. if the term only works with one font why is the software picking a random one from the system conf?

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#190

Post by maficious »

onion2k wrote: post #182
vermilingua wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some schoolyard level stuff right here. The GP isn't using a monospaced font. Who, in the history of terminal emulators, has wanted to use a non-monospaced font in their terminal?

This is exactly the sort of "we can just skip that feature to make it faster!" edge case that I was talking about in my post.

Would you actually...?
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