Sin and computer code
I freely admit that while at work coding programs most computer programmers are probably not thinking about the effects of sin on their work. But that is just the situation I find myself in. My new job is working on an information management system for private schools. A new issue has recently come up with a couple of the schools that use our product. The issue involves families and parents. Our program has support for establishing relationships in the system which in turn drive a lot of the mailing lists, reports and other functionality. This is all well and good until the definitions of what a parent or a family is get to be stretched. There are some situations at these schools where there might be a number of different people to whom a student is related, some of whom have legal custody while others do not; some of whom live with the student while others do not. This makes the task of figuring out who the parents are of a student pretty difficult. It also makes it difficult to determine how to define a “family” at these schools. Do you include the non-resident, step father with no legal custody in a mailing to parents? It was as situations like this kept coming up that I got to thinking about how sin effects even the deepest corners of our existence, even down to the computer code I write. I mean it is easy to think about how to write code to support a family that consists of a husband and a wife and X number of children. It gets to be much more difficult as the complexity of those relationships increases. It saddens me to see so many broken family relationships as these schools. It frustrates me that my work has become difficult and futile as a result of sin. We should never be comfortable with the fact that we live in a world full of sin. This is not the way things should be.