Sin and Software
It's amazing how sin creates difficulties in software development. I (and my coworkers) constantly have to deal with various cases in our code that would not exist apart from sin. For example, our database used to only support someone having two parents. Sadly in our world today that is not enough, so now someone can have four parents. In a few cases, even that has not been enough, but we've put our foot down and said that that is not a data issue, that is a personal issue and an extreme edge case that we will not cater to. We also run data integrity checks to make sure our data makes sense - for example "Mrs. John" wouldn't make sense because "John" is a male name, and "Mrs." is a female prefix. We also check to make sure someone doesn't have more than one father or mother. Sadly, we can't run that particular check in Massachusetts. (Admit it - even if you support gay marriage, when you read "more than one father", you subconciously agreed that should not happen.)Now I'm dealing with another issue where I need to consider not pairing certain people together for certain events. How much easier this programming would be without having to worry about whether Person A likes Person B.So, it can just be crazy to consider how sin affects even this. Of course, maybe there would be no such thing as "programming" if there were no sin...but I'm not so sure about that.
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March 4th, 2009 - 16:53
Interesting point you bring up. Although there are situations where “sin” is not the reason for having more than two parents (granted, one would have to be deceased and the other remarried, but still). I guess I can’t think of a reason to have more than four parents listed … if the kid’s parents have had multiple divorces / marriages, shouldn’t the most recent … um, set? … be the legal party responsible?
Above four (or two, for that matter) seems a bit ridiculous. Even in my current situation, my father’s wife and my mother’s husband have no legal guardianship over me and aren’t in any paperwork or anything. But I guess I’m over 18, which may make a difference.
In a purely Biblical sense, I can’t think of a “no-sin” situation where a child would have more than one father or mother (again unless step-fathers and step-mothers are involved).
The “Mrs. John” check seems a little misleading. People who have their sex changed usually change their names to correspond. I guess I can see someone caught in limbo – after an operation but before a legal name change – but that case seems rare. Do you actually run into problems with that?
Finally, as far as keeping track of whether Person A likes Person B … are you writing scheduling software or a social networking site? Who cares if A likes B (really … do your clients actually request these features?!) … that seems way out of your job description!
There are my two cents
March 4th, 2009 - 17:48
I knew I could rely on you leaving your two cents (or 1/4 or 1 cent due to the current economy).
The “Mrs. John” example was just an example of a legitimate data check, not related to the “Sin” issue at all. We don’t run in to problems where people are actually *trying* to put that in, it’s more when there is a mis-click on a form or something.
You are right, the deceased parent / living parent remarrying situation is a legitimate one where someone could be considered to have more than two parents. However, from a software standpoint, the deceased parent would have no legal custody or etc., and the step-parent could replace them in that role – still using up only the two, shall we say, “active” parent slots.
March 5th, 2009 - 10:39
Can’t say too much about the data verification issue. Perhaps a form letter to the offending parties informing them that they failed a data sanity check and need to change their names would work.
As for multiple parents, I’m going to suggest anathema. . . an unformatted ‘Notes’ field in the database. Helpful information like the patient’s polymorphous lineage, favorite color, and body odor can be recorded here. Think of it as analogous to a carefully filed document folder containing a stack of post-it notes. . . not pretty, but easy to implement.
March 11th, 2009 - 00:48
One of the nifty things about being a programmer is that you kind of have to understand things down to a detailed, formal level (unless you like bugs). That has a way of revealing things that people would rather not talk about explicitly.
March 12th, 2009 - 15:48
I think it’s interesting to note that having to account for more than 2 parents, even in the situation where one parent remarried after the other parents death, is still due, in some way, to sin. From Romans 5 “… just as sin entered the world through man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned…”