Re: PostgreSQL in the press again

On Sat, Nov 13, 2004 at 01:45:50PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> We definitely concur with that, which is why we are re-writing it ...
> going to Java, as Andrew has mentioned, was *not* a design decision that
> we made, but was made for us :(

I didn't, however, intend that to be a proof that Java was the wrong
tool for replication.  It was, however, the wrong tool used the wrong
way for this job.

There was a thread on the erserver list about why the implementation
sucked as much as it did in certain places.  But to give folks a
flavour of it, the original Java porter ("OJP") was one of those
big-design guys.  So he had an apparent plan for an error-reporting
abstraction layer.  Problem was, he never wrote it.  So every raised
exception in the program caused the error handling stub to be called,
which simply spit out an exception.  The net result was that you
_always_ got the error-handling stub line number in every exception.
Bugs?  Hey, grovel through the code a line at a time and see if you
can figure out why it died.  It's edumacashunal.

I'm with Jan on this: poor programming can be done in any language at
all.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The plural of anecdote is not data.
        --Roger Brinner