Will Your Code Run Ten Years From Now?

Nicolas Rougier, a computational neuroscientist and programmer at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology in Bordeaux, writes: I organized with [Konrad Hinsen, a theoretical biophysicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Orleans] the “Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge,” whose goal was to check if researchers would be able to run their own code that has been published at least ten years ago (i.e. before 2010). Most participants managed to run it, but it was not without pain. Today, Nature published an article summarizing the different problems we encountered. I myself tried to re-run an Apple II program I wrote 32 years ago on a vintage Apple IIe. This was quite instructive, especially regarding modern software system with the dependencies hell.