Bleh

Some people really know how to piss me off. So I was answering work emails today, and a discussion come up on one of our lists about how a user doesn't want to pay the upgrade price to use one of the Pro features in REALbasic. This Pro feature happens to be one that I wrote... He was looking for ways to write this feature himself using just RB to do so. Well, the discussion digressed into people who really don't have that much knowledge about how complex networking code can really be explaining to this poor soul that it isn't too hard to do. I know at least one of those users (out of about three) has somewhat of a clue since he's done networking coding before. But I really don't think that any of them fully grasped just how tough it is to get right. So needless to say, they were arguing against me on the list claiming that this should be a very easy feature to write in RB itself. Well... sure it is! If you don't any error checking. Or buffer checking. And you only want synchronous sockets. And you don't mind it working too slow. And it only works on one platform. If that's your goal, then it's a breeze -- I could whip out 25 lines of code for you to do it in (or so). But they don't seem to quite understand that networking isn't a feature you just implement in an afternoon and it all just works. Our code's been thru many iterations, has had a ton of stress testing and has been combed thru with a pick to make sure there are no possible buffer overruns. You also don't see a single bug report about buffer overruns, crashes, speed concerns or dropped connections in our feedback system since the networking code has been rewritten. And yet there are people on the list who I know have never written a lick of native socket code before claiming that it's easy to do.

I guess this wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't something I had poured ton of time an energy into writing. I've written our TCP, UDP, ServerSocket and SSLSocket code for 4 major platforms -- I'm no n00b at writing networking code. But then people go in public and make claims like "I could do that, and it'd be easy".... it'd be like me walking up to a master electrician and telling him that the highrise he just wired for the last two years must have been a snap to do and that I could do it too. I guess I just find it belittling like that.

Needless to say, I don't feel much like answering anymore networking questions on the lists anymore since people seem to feel that I obviously have no clue what I am doing. I'm sure I'll end up answering them again at some point since everyone expects it of me -- but damn, I sure don't want to anytime soon. I know that sounds awfully pouty and childish, but frankly, I don't really care. If people don't value my opinion and will publicly contradict me on topics they don't fully understand, then I don't feel too eager to help them out.