There is no 'useless work' here, as the socket is in blocking mode, but there is:
- A pointless initialization of 'comingText'.
- A failure to check it for null, so it will spin mindlessly at EOS.
- An incorrect handling of IOExceptions: not all of them are fatal, e.g. SocketTimeoutException, and none of them should cause an immediate System.exit().
- The line read is thrown away, which is an application protocol error.
So it is definitely wrong.