Temptations of Software Engineers

Have you ever been tempted to use a technology just because of the technology itself? Was the technology such a fancy thing that you could not resist? Please do not do that! A result of your work would be barely usable in the real life. Do you know the superior Swiss knife with all the stuff inside? I am in doubt you could ever carve a little wooden ship for your son with it.
Let me tell you a true story of a software engineer and an application he developed.

Once upon a time, there was a guy who decided to learn Java and all its bright features, which brought the light on every programmer's possible problem. He chose a set of features that were most interesting to him including serialization, and multi threading. To be not all alone and to verify his code, he decided to take a community as a hostage. Let's inspect a couple of his mistakes.

First, serialization is good for remote method invocation, for sending objects over network, and even for storing small project configurations into a file. It should not be used as a primary data storage, since there are relational databases for such a purpose. If you wanted to be thread safe in a serialize-everything environment, you must keep all the objects in the memory and (de)serialize them only on an application start/shutdown. It is slow, complicated and inefficient way.

Second, multi threading is a powerful thing but it is like the fire - it can be very dangerous. Threads are not independent processes. You should be careful about them, especially if they are running third party code. Apart of that issue, the biggest problem was that Thread.stop() does not stop a waiting thread on all JVM implementations. It is not good idea to stick to an implementation detail. Later, Thread's methods stop(), suspend(), and resume() have become deprecated because it showed up that they are unsafe.

I could have continue here with similar cases but that should be enough to show what I meant by temptations. If the project were now buried deep in the binary scarp, everything was fine. Unfortunately, the community around it become large and the project is massively used nowadays. And the users must fight with those design issues hidden deep inside of it.