Marjan Venema

5,040 reputation

31525

bio	website	bjmsoftware.com
	location	Netherlands
	age	51
visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
	seen	7 hours ago
stats	profile views	487

Software developer since 1985. Started in Cobol, moved via Clipper/VB to Delphi. Delphi developer since 1998. Work(ed) both self-employed and employed.

Questions

When you ask a question, show your effort, provide all the details that will help someone to help you and be precise.

Answers

When you answer a question, don't just paste your code. Your answers will be much better when you explain why your code is doing what it does and how it achieves the asker's goal. It makes it a whole lot easier to follow along. As it is I am much more inclined to up-vote answers that have explanatory text about what the code is doing and why it is written as it is.

Answers that just contain links aren't likely to get an up-vote from me either

Other

Obligatory link whenever someone thinks they are improving security by imposing all sorts of rules on password composition: Password strength

	5,040 reputation	bio	website	bjmsoftware.com	visits	member for	2 years, 9 months
31525 badges		location	Netherlands		seen	7 hours ago

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1d	awarded	Nice Answer
2d	comment	How to ask a programmer a question without getting a solution as the answer +1 Very nice write up of the XY problem.
2d	answered	Is it normal that I can't keep in my head more than thee bugs assigned to me, nor can I understand a thousand lines of spaghetti code?
2d	comment	How to ask a programmer a question without getting a solution as the answer Because more senior programmers know that most questions asked of them are XY-questions.
2d	comment	Object Initializer in C# problem with readability Ah ok. Yes, I agree that it is not a best practice, in C# or in Delphi.
2d	comment	Object Initializer in C# problem with readability Constructors not protected against exceptions? Wow. This is a huge mental shift for someone coming from Delphi, where an exception thrown in a constructor automatically results in the destructor being called and the var which would have received the reference guaranteed to be nil.
2d	comment	Object Initializer in C# problem with readability +10 (Though SE makes you settle for +1) Thanks for a great concise yet comprehensive tutuorial on this subject.
Jun 15	revised	Do all programs run in a loop? added 261 characters in body
Jun 15	comment	Do all programs run in a loop? @gnat: yeah, you are right.
Jun 15	answered	Do all programs run in a loop?
Jun 15	comment	Do all programs run in a loop? @gnat: Exactly. The distinguishing factor isn't the interface - commandline or (G)UI - but whether the program is interactive or not.
Jun 14	comment	Is 25% to me as sole author a good deal? Book authors usually only get 10% royalty by poublishers on consumer price of the book.
Jun 14	comment	Messages from UI or from subs? @JeffO: You can have validation in the UI, but that should only be in addition to (and probably is a subset of) the validation in the business/domain layer. Especially when you have a (multi-tier) client/server architecture. Any validation done in a client (to enhance the UI experience or avoid continual round-tripping to the server) cannot be relied on by the server.
Jun 14	answered	Messages from UI or from subs?
Jun 12	awarded	Electorate
Jun 9	answered	Freelancing and GPL?
Jun 7	comment	Why was strict parsing not chosen for HTML? @Brian: Robustness means you should not fall over when you receive crap. It does not mean you have to make sense of crap.
Jun 6	answered	Designing a robust architecture for multiple export types?
Jun 5	comment	Is it bad programming practice to check if a class referenced by its interface is an instance of another class? @MikeG Indeed. Asking the interface for a reference to for example `ITargetable` which would have that method (and any others to do with Targetable stuff) would be better.
Jun 5	comment	Is it bad programming practice to check if a class referenced by its interface is an instance of another class? @ftr A better way w/could be to put that extra method in a separate interface `ITartgetable` and ask the original interface reference whether it can return a reference to ITargetable.