It takes a PhD to develop that • Hacker News Board

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#321

Post by zadjii » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:42 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #92

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that Windows Terminal is a recent greenfield project.

Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet). Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows…

And see, even you've done it here. Command Prompt is `cmd.exe`, which is different from PowerShell (`powershell.exe`), and both of those are different still from `conhost.exe`, which is the actual console window itself. cmd and powershell are "shells", which both need to run in a console, and conhost.exe is that console (which is the "terminal window" for these applications). More reading: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md...

Conhost is the window that's had updates all throughout Windows 10. It's responsible for both the console subsystem, and the console UI. The UI though is the part that's largely being replaced by the Terminal. Conhost will never go away, but the Terminal is where all the action is these days.

(It's also shipping with Windows 11 by default)

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#322

Post by dqpb » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

amw-zero wrote: post #202

tinco wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the experienced developer is Casey Muratori who is somewhat well known for being a very experienced developer. That makes it less likely that he doesn't know what he's talking about and is skipping over hard/slow features.

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.

condescending: having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority.

In this case he also demonstrated his superiority with working code.

Better to learn from it than to pout about it.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#323

Post by zadjii » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:44 PM UTC

thriftwy wrote: post #127

dagw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet). Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows…

Corporate practices are to blame here also, where instead of improving the existing solution, a new project is launched, which often carries nothing from the previous one. Then the public will conflate two products, and some will avoid the new one not knowing if it's here to stay (another corporate antipattern).

Actually, the Windows Terminal shares a lot of its codebase with the Windows Console. The buffer, the VT parser, the renderer interface, most of the UIA implementation - that's all the same code. Improvements here to the Terminal actually help conhost.exe as well.

The UI of the Terminal is what's new, because trying to iterate on the legacy UI of conhost.exe was simply not maintainable.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#324

Post by adamdusty » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #273

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #249

The difference here is that the developer of RefTerm is an experienced, professional developer passionate about his craft and building good software. Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. There's no shame in that. But there is shame in patronising someone when they demonstrate something to be false and lo…

> Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft the company, please remember that the individual workers and managers are people who can be hurt by our tendency to form self-righteous mobs. And according to another commenter [1], one of the people working on Windows Te…

Those individual workers hurt the project and the community around it by setting the precedent that you need to create your own competing product to verify that bugs can be fixed without PhD research.

Nobody should be harassed over their open source project, but that doesn't mean actions don't trigger reactions.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#325

Post by zadjii » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

thriftwy wrote: post #3

Nope! It's just that in corporate world, developers rarely do what they think is relevant for them. The people who did Windows terminal probably cared a lot about COM or WinAPI or maybe CS, but I think it's fair to imagine how they were not fans of text-oriented interfaces. It just did not occur that they should be extracting last bit of performance here. People can type just that fast, after all.

TBF we've actually maintained the Windows Console for the better part of 5 years and we're incredibly passionate about performance. We live and breath in the commandline. Performance has always been one of our P1 priorities, because improvements to the console have second-order impacts on the entire commandline ecosystem.

There is an engineering tradeoff though - we've only got so many devs and at a certain point you have to say "good enough for now, we'll come back to this, let's go do this other thing for now". The Terminal is faster than conhost was, and that's a good place to start, but I don't think anyone things we're done working on the Terminal, and we're certainly not done working on its perf ;)

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#326

Post by moritonal » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #285

gnustop wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the comment below in the github thread sums up the attitude of the developer. It's definitely not a "neutral" attitude. It's somewhat chip-on-shoulder and somewhat aggressive. > Setting the technical merits of your suggestion aside though: peppering your comments with clauses like “it’s that simple” or “extremely simple” and, somewhat unexpectedly “am I missing something?” can be read as impugning the reader.…

That exact case seem a very appropriate scenario for clarifying? Microsoft kept saying something was difficult, whilst Casey knew that it was not, so really he was being polite by first confirming that there wasn't something he'd overlooked?

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#327

Post by xatnys » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

avereveard wrote: post #298

jiggawatts wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>refterm was ready to replace the terminal app

Considering Casey himself puts front and center the disclaimer that this is solely intended to be a reference and goes into as much detail in his videos I don't know where you got this from. I don't think anyone is under the illusion that this is could replace the actual terminal. It's just meant to show that there's a minimum level of performance to be expected for not a huge amount of effort (a couple weekend's worth) and there is no excuse for less.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#328

Post by c7DJTLrn » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #273

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #249

The difference here is that the developer of RefTerm is an experienced, professional developer passionate about his craft and building good software. Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. There's no shame in that. But there is shame in patronising someone when they demonstrate something to be false and lo…

> Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft the company, please remember that the individual workers and managers are people who can be hurt by our tendency to form self-righteous mobs. And according to another commenter [1], one of the people working on Windows Te…

This might get me some shit but running away like that isn't a good trait to have. Not for Microsoft, but also not for themselves. This will probably be in the back of their mind for a chunk of their career since they have no closure.

I would expect somebody working on a greenfield project at one of the biggest software companies in the world to tackle issues head on with grace.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#329

Post by mark-r » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

rich_sasha wrote: post #192

TeMPOraL wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need some extra processing power to support larger screens and refresh rates. Arguably, security benefits of managed code / sandboxing are worth it - but the runtimes seem to be pretty-well optimized. Other than that, I don't see anything reasonable to justify the low performance of most software.

I'd imagine software is bloated and grown until is it still-just-about usable on modern hardware. Making it faster there is probably seen as premature optimisation. I'd imagine perhaps this is how product teams are assessed - is the component just-about fast enough, and does it have lots of features. So long as MS Office is the most feature-rich software package, enterprise will buy nothing else, slow or not.

It doesn't even need to be the most feature-rich any more. Microsoft has figured out that the key is corporate licensing.

Is Teams better than Zoom? No, but my last employer ditched Zoom because Teams was already included in their enterprise license package and they didn't want to pay twice for the same functionality.

Re: It takes a PhD to develop that

#330

Post by hintymad » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

> Based on my limited anecdotal evidence, it seems to me that the software industry doesn’t value technical excellence as much as it values having warm bodies report to you. This in turn limits the amount of experience an average programmer working on these big projects will have, just because they are incentivized to leave the hands on implementation work for some sort of a leadership role as soon as possible.

+10000. This is so true. It's not just that people are incentivized to leave hands-on work. Every level of the management genuinely believe that a senior engineer should not spend much time on hands-on work but instead should focus on "tech leadership", which in a big company means going to meetings, influencing other teams, writing white papers, and of course "coordinating".