I think Casey's somewhat caustic exasperation can be a major distraction at times, especially if you are exposed to it the first time you listen to him. But I have to say, his frustration is justified. He has valid complaints about almost the entire industry and educational system, so it's not just directed at Microsoft, and certainly not just at the individual grunts working there (almost all of use are grunts). I do know some of the backstory behind Casey starting this reference project/experiment (I won't post the GitHub issue "lore" here, as it'll just create even more of a "he started it, no he did" back-and-forth), so I think there is some mutual animus with these particular grunts, but I think that's not at all interesting, and I don't think knowing the backstory changes anything.
Instead of just personalizing his critique (ignoring that Casey makes it easy to do that), think of it this way: why hasn't Microsoft leadership, running a multi-billion dollar company for decades, already devoted appropriate resources to create an essentially perfect terminal/console, something so discrete and simple and fixed in feature-set?
Also, I don't put much stock in the complaint about Casey's license choice. He made plenty of educational content delving into the design and implementation details, and one of his major points is that non-pessimisation implementations such as his have so little code in the first place.
> why hasn't Microsoft leadership, running a multi-billion dollar company for decades, already devoted appropriate resources to create an essentially perfect terminal/console, something so discrete and simple and fixed in feature-set?
competing priorities, lack of customer interest, lack of need, desire to keep backwards compatibility, additional support workload, probable belief that they had a good enough terminal, they couldn't find the right people (the project lead for the new terminal was hired into Microsoft specifically for that position, leading me to believe they didn't have anyone internally who was qualified or interested enough to take the job), and because a fully compatible terminal is not trivial to make.
they can't go back in time and make it, they can only change what they're doing now, and Terminal is getting better all the time.
complaint about behavior that is no longer happening is just masturbation, plain and simple.
yes, Casey has shown that, and I am thankful for it, and for him, because I didn't know it was as easy as it is. It turns out that a lot of people didn't know it could be so easy.
The approach Casey took is very obvious to game developers, and very foreign to other people, I would think. We're all still so poisoned by OOP and the normalization of unnecessary complexity that straight-forward solutions often don't occur to us.
Casey's misstep here is the same misstep that many of us make, and have made; the assumption that everyone should know something or understand it just as well. It is often hard for an individual to believe that something which they find obvious could be so out of reach of another person.
One might respond to that with "A Microsoft employee should know this kind of thing," and to that I would ask where they're supposed to get this "Microsoft people should know" knowledge. Where's this "Microsoft should know" academy? What is the list of things that an employee of a company like Microsoft should always know in order to be forgiven by the argumentative HN patron? There isn't a place for them to go, of course, they can only rely on their experience and their colleagues to help them do their work, the same as everyone else, and every person, team, and company has blind spots. Every last one.
I think the best part of Casey’s critique is pointing out that trends indicate that those blind spots are only getting bigger. Individual/personal corrections are absolutely possible, but they’re not going to stop this accelerating blind spot growth problem (especially if just as many individuals are turned off by the tenor of the critique as are convinced by its substance — this aspect is where most of my many qualifications about his critique come from).
Personally, even taking his caustic critique as given, he’s more criticizing MS than the MS developers. If you know Casey’s opinions on FAANG companies, you’d know that when he says what a MS employee “should” know, it does not come from a position of holding MS in high esteem. He means, “how is this multi-billion dollar company getting it so wrong” not “how are these pitiable developers letting down the honorable MS corporation”.
Instead of just personalizing his critique (ignoring that Casey makes it easy to do that), think of it this way: why hasn't Microsoft leadership, running a multi-billion dollar company for decades, already devoted appropriate resources to create an essentially perfect terminal/console, something so discrete and simple and fixed in feature-set?
Also, I don't put much stock in the complaint about Casey's license choice. He made plenty of educational content delving into the design and implementation details, and one of his major points is that non-pessimisation implementations such as his have so little code in the first place.