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It takes a PhD to develop that

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Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#291

Post by dspillett »

gnustop wrote: post #221
amw-zero wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he had a condescending tone from the beginning (as he always does). Maybe if he was more respectful / likable, the developers would have responded better.

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'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?

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#292

Post by thn-gap »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #128
lstamour wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the thread itself, it’s a bit of both. Windows Terminal is complex, ClearType is complex and Unicode rendering is complex. That said… https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm does exist, does not support ClearType, but does claim to fully support Unicode. Unfortunately, Microsoft can’t use the code because (a) it’s GPLv2 and (b) it sounds like the Windows Terminal project is indeed a bit more complicated than can…

> (a) it’s GPLv2 Why is that a problem? A GPLv2 terminal would not be a business problem for Microsoft. People would still have to buy licenses for Windows. Maybe they would lose a little face, but arguably they have already done so. At least it’s not GPLv3 which this industry absolutely and viscerally hates (despite having no problem Apache 2.0 for some reason, Theo de Raadt is at least consistent).

If Microsoft embedded the GPLv2 terminal into Windows, Windows would have to release as GPLv2 (or compatible license). I assume they don't want that.

They can alternatively buy a commercial license, as another user said below.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#293

Post by avereveard »

mwcampbell wrote: post #253
maficious wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, whatever is different in your settings, mine renders normal https://imgur.com/dGI5W2S EDIT: I am sorry for the attitude, changed "wrong" to "different"

Their settings aren't wrong, just different, likely because of differing standards for digit grouping across locales. So this is a case that refterm clearly doesn't support. This case by itself doesn't invalidate refterm's approach to rendering, but I can see why the team at Microsoft, knowing that there are many such cases, would favor abstraction over the absolute best possible speed.

which is exactly the point.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#294

Post by avereveard »

maficious wrote: post #218
avereveard wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some f*** proportional Calibri Refterm defaults to Cascadia Code cascadia is as borken as the other font, so what now? https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png maybe writing a unicode rendering isn't that easy? maybe drop the attitude?

Turned out it defaults to Cascadia Mono, my bad. Still your argument is wrong, because, like it doesn't work on your machine, on mine it does.

which is exactly the point, the amount of shortcut taken to convert code point to fast graphics make it just a nice hack thrown together and devs were right on preferring the slow but correct approach.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#295

Post by toflon »

zibzab wrote: post #275
jameshart wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to be clear, Microsoft probably has plenty of people capable of writing this kind of code. They just aren’t working on console. In fact, consider the hypothetical of: what if Microsoft had hired Casey Muratori. Do you imagine they’d have put him on the console team? I mean the Windows console, not the X Box console, or the Minecraft console.

Microsoft has _Micheal Abrash_. He wrote The Book on rendering performance. Michael's super optimized x86 assembly routines for lighting and texturing is the reason we can run Quake on toasters. Anyway, I don't think they should hire Casey. Specially after that demonstration of not understanding the big-picture and not being a team player...

Do you have some examples of what big-picture stuff Casey doesn't understand? Not talking about being a team-player.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#296

Post by onion2k »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #235
onion2k wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, what? Your edge case is something that no one would ever (should ever?) do? Are you going to complain about it not rendering scripts fonts correctly either? Also, it's worth noting that this isn't a compelling argument in the first place because the windows terminal doesn't even come close to rendering readable Arabic, it fucks up emoji rendering, etc – all cases that Casey was able to basically solve after two…

In my 25 years of software development I've found that I'm rarely able to enumerate what an application should or shouldn't do on my own. Unless the app is extremely simple and has very few options it's incredibly unusual for any individual to understand everything about it. While I don't have a use case where I'd want to use a variable space font in a terminal, that doesn't mean such a case doesn't exist for anyone. Maybe some people want that feature.

Windows Terminal, for some reason, gives users the option to change their font to one that isn't monospaced, so I'd argue that it should render them correctly if the user chooses to do that.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#297

Post by exdsq »

Jach wrote: post #170
TeMPOraL wrote: post #67

Yup, this. Something I've been ranting about[0] for a while: there is no technical progression ladder. The Senior->Principal-> ... path seems to be a faux-management track, with all the managerial responsibilities and little of the authority. Software is shitty in big part because it's mostly written by juniors, as almost anyone who has any clue moves over (or gets pushed over) to managerial or faux-managerial roles.…

There may be a sort of sweet spot in the progression where a programmer can advance to a point where they spend most of their time figuring out the code architecture (maybe with a skeleton) for others to implement the details of, with some code reviews here and there, rather than coding as much themselves (but they still code, especially the critical pieces). This lets them still be a key player as far as programming…

Is this not what old-school corporate dev environments did? Grunts filling in interfaces? I’m sure I’ve read this sort of thing before

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#298

Post by avereveard »

jiggawatts wrote: post #228
avereveard wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't work even with the proper font https://i.imgur.com/WeV8Ror.png

You're not arguing in good faith. Casey threw something together in a matter of days that had 150% of the features of the Windows Terminal renderer , but none of the bug fixing that goes into shipping a production piece of software. That screenshot you keep parading around is a small issue with a quick fix. It's not like Casey's approach is inherently unable to deal with punctuation! You don't discard the entire cont…

You've lost the original point: everyone was pretending this refterm was ready to replace the terminal app, criticizing microsoft for taking the slow but sure approach:

> The "complaining developer" produced a proof of concept in just two weekends that notably had more features[1] and was more correct than the Windows Terminal!

But now apparently pointing out that "MS was right not to want to take shortcut in unicode rendering" morphed into "criticizing in bad faith refterm for not being production ready"

Who's not arguing in good faith here?

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#299

Post by loufe »

I work as a mining engineer and in my eyes these stages are effectively the same as the author describes in the software world. I'd even argue they apply to most "professional" careers.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#300

Post by phkahler »

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'…

>> 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' that it can be faster by making a proof-of-concept the only reason theirs is faster is because it doesn't implement the important-but-slow bits and it ignores most of the edge cases.

Even in those cases it usually turns out that the handling of edge cases was considered reason enough to sacrifice performance rather than finding a better solution to the edge case. Handling edge cases probably should not cost 10x average performance.

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