Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

Challenge to scientists: does your ten-year-old code still run?

Would your ten-year-old code still run?

The Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge dares scientists to find and re-execute old code, to reproduce computationally driven papers that they had published ten or more years earlier. Extinct hardware and dead programming languages are among the hurdles for researchers taking it on in a bid to illuminate how code can be made more resilient to change. “Ten years is a very, very, very, very long time in the software world,” says Victoria Stodden, who studies computational reproducibility. “Roughly equivalent in the software world to infinity”.

Nature | 12 min read