Programming with Precision

Posted on: 10 September 2024 by Andrew Perry
Posted in: [Creation]

Although my academic background was in pure science, I have spent my whole working career in computer technology, mainly in the programming field. Although I am now largely retired, I still find myself doing a fair bit of programming in connection with one thing or another. I have been challenged during the last week whilst working on the upgrading of a certain piece of computer software. This focused around one particular file that currently contains 1757 lines of software code. (In all fairness, I've got to say that a good number of lines are devoted to comments and layout to improve readability, but even so, it is still a substantial amount of code, and probably bigger than a single file should ideally be, but that is the way it is.) The changes were quite complex and also affected code in a number of other files.

Computer software takes a lot of intelligence and brain power to design, write and test, as programming is a very precise and sometimes complex operation. It can take just one minor typing or logic error in a large piece of code to stop a whole system from functioning correctly, and it can often be a somewhat tedious process to actually trace the source of the problem. One of the challenges I faced this week was in the fact that changes made to one file did not appear to work at first, and this turned out to be a knock-on effect from program code in another place, which itself then needed to be updated.

In previous posts, I have looked at the complexity of biological systems, not least in relation to the subject of DNA. All I really want to say here is that if it takes the work of intelligent design to create computer software and get it into a fully functional condition, then surely, biology in all its complexity, has likewise got to be the work of intelligent design.

The Cell

The Beginning of Time