Sometimes I wonder
Posted : Tuesday September 29th, 2009

I wonder about people sometimes. I really do. I have been recently witnessing a slow train wreck on the Java forums with a new user. Now I should start off by pointing out that the user admits to be very new to Java, in their thread of last week they claimed to be programming in it for all of 24 hours thus far (later expanded to 48). Which is fine, there are new programmers all the time, it's one of the main uses of the forum. But of course this one is trying to write some sort of application for business use that in short is a multi-threaded socket server.

In two words. Uh oh.

The ultimate point of failure in this, and the part that really makes me scratch my head is this users arrogance. They claim to have programmed before in some language. Which I think is true, although they have obviously never dealt with either threading or sockets before in any language. But the real kicker is that they don't seem to be listening to any really good advice. Like for example the kind I gave in the first thread they started.

In the first thread they started I gave the user the proper threading model to use for their program. What threads will do what and where synchronized work queues will go. And what will be hard and what will be easy. Now sure it was high level, but I was willing to give more if asked (and of course wasn't) and more importantly I know it's actually right.

So from the looks of more recent threads by the user, which I have declined to participate in, the project is moving forward, directly to the rocky shoals. If it ever works at all, which is unlikely, it will not scale and most likely will deadlock and crash.

And that's about what you can expect to happen when someone who doesn't know what they are doing writes a multithreaded socket server.

And the question that I am left wondering, as I always am, is why is this person asking for "advice"? Their arrogance blinds them from accepting good advice, they somehow think "they know" the way the app should be written... even though they have no idea of how to write it. Here's a clue, if you don't know how to implement your design then you shouldn't be designing in the first place.

I am just truly perplexed at the logic that leads one to make these sorts of decisions.

Tags

behaviour  error  forums  IO 

Categories

Internet  Personal 

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