The Moral Code
The Catholic blog humorsphere keeps growing and one of the best new additions since the laugh-out-loud catholicnews.org is Musum Pontificalis a blog styled as if written by the Holy Father. The blog is written I believe by Rick Lugari of Unam Sanctum so I am not suprised by how funny this parody blog is.
The latest post on relativism and programming languages is also pretty funny and especially appealed to me.
If a computer programmer attempts to apply a Relativist philosophy to his craft, he will fail. A Relativist can try all he wants to force the computer to accept his irrational commands, but it simply won’t work. There is a specific code that the computer is designed to operate by, and that code means something.
Likewise, God, as the Supreme Programmer has written a code for us, it is a moral code (Morals++?), and it means something, and try as we might, we just won’t function properly, or be what we were intended to be without following the proper code.
Which makes me ponder that perhaps a daily examination of conscience is like a moral debugger. A debugger in coding is usually used to step through your code so that you can find where an error is and then to take corrective acton. Same thing with an examination of conscience. Going through the day and and finding those snippets of moral code that were not quite right or contrary to our basic operating instructions ("Love God with all our heart and our neighbor as ourselves"). When we find these moral code errors during an examination of conscience we can then apply corrective action through the will and through prayer.
When testing out a program occasionally the program will throw an exception with the type of error and line it occurred on. Unfortunately our consciences are not quite so specific or maybe that is fortunate indeed. If we ignore those errors just like in programming it will eventually cause a crash. Repentance is the equivalent of rebooting, though if you run the same program in the exact same way without fixing it - it will crash again. It is amazing how much we do that in our lives hoping that the consequences of ours sins were just a glitch or a bug and not the necessary outcome of our actions.
Now if only I could write moral code snippets for my own life.
do while (true)
{
++holiness;
}
Known as 
I totally agree! I might share this analogy with some of my coworkers (computer programmers).
One small note: I think you mean "exception" instead of "exemption" in the last paragraph.
Recursion is another example of how computer science, on occasion, approaches theology. For those of you who are not computer scientists, a little background is in order.
Some problems can be succinctly and elegantly solved using an algorithm that, at some point, executes itself, using different parameters. There are several examples typically used to illustrate recursion in undergraduate CS courses; one is computing the factorial of some integer number N, which is the product of all the integers from 1 to N. To compute this recursively, your routine would look something like this (in a C-derived language):
int factorial(int n)
{
if (n == 1) return 1;
else return n * factorial(n-1);
}
This is not the best way to compute factorials, but it's a very clear demonstration of how recursion works. In fact, it's also a clear demonstration of the two things you need for a recursive routine that actually works:
1. The routine needs to execute itself (the second line of the example)
2. The routine needs a base case where it stops executing itself (the first line of the example.)
That second point is absolutely vital. If there is no base case where recursion terminates, your program will in theory never stop running; it will continue to execute itself over and over. In the trade we call this infinite recursion. In practice, what actually happens is that your program blows up in your face; it runs out of memory and is stopped, or it runs afoul of the operating system and is stopped, or something like.
It's a lovely analogue to thinking about God as the uncaused cause or the unmoved mover. Just as every invocation of your recursive routine except the last points beyond itself to the base case, so all of creation points beyond itself to God.
Actually, you'd want:
do while (true)
{
++holiness;
}
:P Same thing with C++: The name of the language, technically, should be ++C.
And then don't you wish if we erred in life we could either do Ctrl + Alt + Del or click on "undo"?
Um, the link to "Musum Pontificalis" is wrong. Just to let ya know...