Twisted Family Tree View

Last Updated on: 10th November 2017, 08:20 am

Theme song time.

You know, programming forums make for pretty dry reading most of the time. But every now and then, something like this appears, illustrating that you never know where you might find something entertaining, or sickening, or both of the above.

I am the developer of some family tree software (written in C++ and Qt). I had no problems until one of my customers mailed me a bug report. The problem is that he has two children with his own daughter, and, as a result, he can’t use my software because of errors.

Those errors are the result of my various assertions and invariants about the family graph being processed (for example, after walking a cycle, the program states that X can’t be both father and grandfather of Y).

How can I resolve those errors without removing all data assertions?

Eeewww.

There were many responses like you would expect, and then, someone who must be part computer, responded with the following.

Maybe next time you’ll try a more abstract example. People here can’t overlook the incest part and just close it, even if it is a valid question regarding the representation of tree like data.

Maybe I’m too easily amused, but that made me chuckle.

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