The Daily WTF

Back when it was new, one of the “great features” of Java was that it made working with threads “easy”. Developers learning the language were encouraged to get a grip right on threads right away, because that was the new thing which would make their programs so much better.

Well, concurrency is hard. Or, to put it another way, “I had a problem, so I decided to use threads. prhave twI Now o oblems.”

Another thing that’s hard in Java is working with dates and times.

Larisa inherited some code which wanted to be able to check the current system time in a threadsafe fashion. They weren’t doing anything fancy- no timezones, no formatting, just getting the Unix Timestamp off the clock. If you’re thinking to yourself, “It’s just a read operation and there’s no need to bring threads into this at all,” you obviously didn’t write today’s code block.

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