http://members.optusnet.com.au/ksaho/work/java/ass2_2311AQUA/Assignment2.pdf
Note “Part 1 (80 marks)” bit.
“A thread to represent each swimming fish.”.
In my technical documentation I have said:
“Each entity is NOT a thread. Creating a thread for each entity is thread abuse; threads take up resources, while it is minimal for the first few threads it can quickly spiral into a performance disaster if not monitored. Better to have a good design than a sorry one.”
What do you guys think?
While you’re right in a real life level, this is a programming assignment designed to help people learn about threading. Maybe one of things people will get out of it is if they use a thread per fish then ramp the fish up to a 1000 the whole thing dies in a big heap, its a learning experience.
How many tutorials have you read online (including my own), where the example isn’t really best practice? Its just a way of getting learners to try stuff, get results and understand.
The real problem is that you’re way to ahead of what you’re being taught. Try not to hassle the instructor/lecturer too much, its a hard life 
Kev
Teaching people to use threads like this is maaajor abuse.
If your app uses more than five threads, it’s almost certainly wrong and should be redone from the ground up.
If you’re a game yes, if you’re a server, maybe. I only skimmed the document, but I didn’t notice it saying how many fish there were going to be 
I’ll have a look… ah, there ya go. 3 fish.
Kev
Yeah, that scales REAL well, then.
If the pupil gets curious (good thing) and start playing around with it and just increase FISH_COUNT (or whatever it is) to 100, he’ll think java is the suckiest programming language in the world.
I also explained why naive threading in servers is a bad thing as well, btw. Scaling, scaling, scaling.
Meh, as I said above, maybe part of the point is letting students scale up with thread and see the problems. No better way to learn!
Plus, naive threading of any sort is a mistake, as in setting an arbitary number of threads as the limit where you should start worrying. 
All I’m trying to say is its very easy to critisize an assignment when you have more knowledge (as this thread proves) than the target audience without seeing it from the eyes of a naive student or a teacher.
Kev
So improper practices like these tend to give false perceptions of Java?
Well, kevglass has a point.
Sometimes the only way to learn something is troublesome is to run into the problems yourself.
And, besides, I really can’t think of a simple way of teaching threads without simplfying it to the point of it being “wrong”.
(Kinda like how teachers make students reinvent the wheel by implementing their own linked lists.)
In this case, probably. But then I’ve seen threads taught like this in a variety of languages and its always going to give a bad impression since (as I think we’ve all agreed), its really not best practice.
Kev
In that case, the “good” lecturer would explicitly suggest that the students try ramping up to 1000 threads, and would then followup with an explanation (next tutorial, perhaps) of why it died AND have a tutorial outlining what you should do.
And if they don’t have time to do that / don’t want to cover it, the least they could do is add a note: “Although threads work well for a few fishes, this is not how threads are supposed to be used in general, and they wouldn’t work properly with more than perhaps 10 fishes. The techniques for that are too advanced to cover here”.
The whole point of this exercise is to teach good practice (OOP). Surely, to simultaneously teach bad practice is to undermine the core learning-objectives?
* blahblahblahh has had plenty of bad teachers in the past, as well as the good ones, and is fed up of the appallingly low quality of teaching some people get away with year after year.
There’s no real excuse for bad teaching, e.g. if the teacher fails to spend even the 30 seconds it took me to type the above warning. Obviously, we don’t have access to the follow-on assignments, but a moderately good teacher (not especially great, just “normal”) would at least drop in the implication that too many fish was going to cause some fundamental problem that would be covered later.
PS: other than that, the assignment looks really good to me, much better than most undergrad examples of trying to teach OOP than I’ve seen (as a tutor).
Ok, ok… I give up… :o
The teacher that I don’t know personally, have never been taught by, must be absolute rubbish because this single tutorial that he/she has set may be leaning toward a dodgy practice, that may or may not be illustrating the point, while trying to teach some at a very low level where it appears to be good form to manage to get your simple program running let alone worrying about the detail.
Teaching is hard - especially when you have students that surpass their expecting level.
Kev
Hehe…this discussion reminds me of my grade 10 programming class.
The teacher and I didn’t get along at all. She was continuously teaching bad practices, and she really had no idea what she was talking about.
The first question on one of the mid-year exam was insulting (not just to me, but to anyone that had been in the class for that long).
Something like: Write a program to output “Hello World” to the screen using basic.
My solution: I used pokes to write a machine language version of the “Hello World” program (technically still in basic). 8)
When she marked it wrong (which I knew she would) - I asked her if she actually tried executing the code. Her reply: “Why would I enter that in? poke() isn’t a function”
I later had the last laugh when I brought it in on disk and showed her it worked, and explained it to her.
As noted above, IMHO the example given is a particularly good OOP learning task (leaving aside where it falls down - but it falls down for want of less than 1 minute additional effort! Given how much effort it takes to put together a task like this, another minute is nothing), and the teacher should be respected for that.
But…too often, excuses are made for poor (usually either lazy or incompetent) teaching. Often there is no valid excuse: crap teachers should get another job, or else start putting more effort into their current job. Bad teaching screws up many people, and too often the poor teacher doesn’t even care how bad their teaching is >:( (seen this too many times first hand from teachers who condemn themselves out of their own mouths).
For a while I worked as an undergraduate tutor helping people who’d been taught badly at a wide variety of unis in the UK, and I used to be a classroom assistant in a local secondary school, so I have a basic grasp (very shallow) of the realities on the other side of the fence. Mostly, you gain an appreciation for how much effort it takes to put together teaching materials (a bit like writing documentation… ;)) - but that’s exactly the same problem I face every day as a manager: it takes considerable time and effort to produce and regularly update schedules, documentation, project plans, progress reports, finance reports, business plans, etc. People don’t say “X’s project is 2 months behind schedule on a 4 month plan, he’s overspent budget by a factor of 2, and all his staff keep resigining - but that’s OK, because being a manager is hard”, they say “X is utterly useless at management and should resign before he gets fired”.
Of course, one of the other things that became increasingly clear the more time I spent around teachers and academic staff was the civil-service-esque unwillingness to actually fire anyone, ever.
[quote]“Each entity is NOT a thread. Creating a thread for each entity is thread abuse; threads take up resources, while it is minimal for the first few threads it can quickly spiral into a performance disaster if not monitored. Better to have a good design than a sorry one.”
[/quote]
I STRONGLY suggest you do not refuse to do the assignment as the instructions state, and do not condescend to your professor/teacher. This is begging for trouble. Like mentioned before, he may very well have future assignments to tackle this problem (or he might not). But refusal to do as asked, and giving him a lecture at the same time might land you in some trouble in the class.
I would suggest that you do the assignment as requested by him and the instructions. THEN when turning it in (or the class soonest after), bring up the topic as a question. Let him discuss it, and teach. As said before, teaching people is hard, and the last thing he needs is a student coping an attitude with him.
Edit: Spelling
Definitely comply with the hive mind of the classroom… if only during class time.
Take it from someone who has been marked down many times by teachers for jumping ahead of an assignment. :
Not only that, but when you get your first asinine boss at work who will not listen to reason regarding proper programming techniques… you’ll be able to grin when you say “Yes sir, may I have another?”
My program was designed for more than 1000 threads. However there are thread limits: on windoze 1200 threads, on Linux 1400 - 1700 threads.
Of cours NO synchronization is guaranteed (with few exceptions) so it scales well even on multi core system.
A THOUSAND threads!?
That’s one gigabyte of wasted memory only for the per-thread stacks, not to mention that you’ve either got a lot of blocking IO (or other) operations going on, or a lot of thread-starving going on.
Either you know exactly what you’re doing, or you’re shooting yourself in the foot with an extremely elaborate gun. I can’t tell which, since you didn’t specify what your program does.
I don’t think you should subvert the exercise purpose. The exercise is not suposed to teach you anything but to test your knowledge and mental gymnastics. You refuse to answer an exercise you get 0. Clean and simple.
As for “creating a thread for each entity is abuse” never give a loud answer in an exercise like this. Your teacher is not an idiot and you have much to learn with him. Even if they, sometimes, have some difficulty explaining things that are difficult to explain, they are usually more concerned in training your mind so that you can use it for yourself than giving you moral receipts on how to program. Allways remenber that you should allways do your own testings and don’t go blindly with programming rules.
School assignments rarely have any grip on reality, but that’s usually not the point anyway. Make the fishy program with threads, showing the teacher you know how to deal with them. The fact that threads aren’t the… most efficient… way of modeling these fish doesn’t matter for the assignment. The best you can do, and you can probably get extra credits for this, is to make a constructive remark in your documentation about it.
If you want to be really sneaky (welcome to office-level politics!), you can make it sound like you feel something is wrong, but don’t know what exactly. Then, when you are discussing it with your teacher, ask him/her about it. Allow him/her to explain it. I’m assuming he/she actually knows what he/she is doing… But actually that doesn’t matter, just nod and sigh in agreement. If teachers hate anything, it’s snotty students who know more than they do, so suck up to them for a higher grade. The sad thing is, if you do this correctly, it usually works. Only when doing projects where you have relative freedom of implementation, you should show that you know things… Oh, one more thing, teachers love design documents and implementation accounting more than the actual programming (Rightfully so, I might add, since for larger projects with more people, the building process becomes FAR FAR more important than the actual code crunching). Last thing: the teacher gives you the grade, you will only have to live with him/her for a few years, so you better be humble, even if the teacher has done nothing to deserve it. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter if you were ‘right’, it matters what grade you get.
If the above is interpretted as the marking guide, then you should be ok designing your application as you see fit.
Although this scheme is contradicted by :-
Ofcourse, if you want to cover all your bases, you could implement both a single and multi-threaded version.
You can then benchmark the 2 and show the lack of scalability the suggested design imposes upon the program.
Don’t think of the assignment as a set task, instead think of it as an opportunity to demonstrate your development, and problem solving skills.
I’m sure Teachers get bored marking the same old Assignments over and over, they would much rather see some innovation and fresh ideas.