Structured Programming

As explained by Mark Rathel, the Pharisees developed a set of rules and regulations, which were oral traditions, to prevent their breaking the Mosiac Law. The resulting righteousness was a “religious righteousness” achieved by keeping traditions. They misunderstood that “genuine righteousness” could only be obtained by the grace of God.

For the lesson, "Strive for Godly Perfection," I was thinking about illustrating this using some ideas from Computer Science. Since its inception, the task of developing useful, bug-free, computer software has been very difficult (like attaining rightness before God by human effort is impossible). For example, it’s estimated that Windows Vista operating system has nearly 50 million lines of code with a development team numbering over three thousand people. Yet on its release, the product was known to contain to a number of bugs, or operating anomalies. Developing bug-free software is a very illusive goal.

Computer Science has developed a number of techniques to improve the chances for a software project to produce bug-free code. For example, in the late 70’s a concept of “Structured Programming” (SP) was promoted as the “right way” to develop software. Associated with it, were a number of detailed recommendations, or programming guidelines for developers to follow (like the rules and regulations of the Pharisees). Whether or not a developer took these suggestions could be easily determined by reading his/her code (external behavior could be observed).

Experienced programmers did not always appreciate SP, but nevertheless, many adopted its “go to-less” programming style, which lead to some pretty code. They kept the rules and regulations as an external behavior, but their ability to produce perfect code remained unchanged.

Despite the invention of SP and many other software engineering techniques, developing perfect code is still only a dream (as the Vista example illustrates).

For people, however, genuine righteousness before God can be obtained by a personal relationship with Jesus Christ who died as a sacrifice for sin.