On Jul 17, 2010, at 3:27 PM, Rafael Cerioli wrote: > Ok, ok busted : I'm not much experienced ! That's precisely why I was > writing to that list in the first place : trying to get knowledge more > concrete than my intuitions, I thought that was the point.
Yes, but you pushed back whenever people tried to give you advice. I understand that it's frustrating not understanding why they are giving that advice, but sometimes that's the nature of experience -- it's hard to explain. Multi-threaded programming is hard to do correctly. The problems encountered are sometimes subtle and non-obvious. They might crop up only intermittently and, perhaps, only under certain rare circumstances. Debugging those problems, even when you can somewhat-reliably reproduce them, is often hellishly difficult. > If I understood you correctly, as an inexperienced programmer I should avoid > threading as much as possible, and I should do so because experienced people > told me to without giving an explanation (except that "you'll get into > trouble"). Frankly, I think that most experienced programmers think that even they, the experienced programmers themselves, should avoid threading if they can. > Or I do not, and I might learn some interesting yet expensive lessons about > threading. True. Experience has to be gained somehow. The thing is, there truly are cases where threading is necessary to get decent application behavior. So, why not wait and learn those hard lessons while working on those cases instead of gratuitously using threading in the cases where there are alternatives, like asynchronous APIs, that are recommended by the community you solicited for advice. > Is there no reason understandable by young programmers about why we should > avoid threading and NSURLConnection ? There's nothing (to my knowledge) specific to NSURLConnection that makes it particularly nasty to combine with threading. It's just that there's a nice, convenient asynchronous API, so you can just sidestep the issue, so that's what most folks here recommend. > Or at least a good piece of documentation ? (would you say Threading > Programming Guide is a good one ? ) The Threading Programming Guide and Concurrency Programming Guide have some good stuff in there. They address some of the pitfalls, but don't quite illustrate the truly nasty, subtle nature of problems sometimes encountered in the real world. I don't have a specific guide or document to point you to. I almost think that blog postings recounting personal debugging horror stories would give a better sense. Or perhaps some of the "What is wrong with this piece of code?" type of programming challenges you sometimes find out there. Regards, Ken _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
