Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines -- flying machines, the peasants said -- from the great days of Canberra's original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise's local net. There were programs that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it -- the horror of it, Sura said -- was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra's past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qenq Ho system. Take the Traders' method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex -- and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qenq Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. Bit if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems. -
A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
They tend to make their changes as small surgical changes that affect the component as little as possible. And the more these surgical changes add up, the more fragile the code gets. As these changes build up, the code in the component starts to resemble a piece of conglomerate rock. The more people add onto the base, the more blobs of other rocks get added to the conglomerate. When I work on the code like this, it sometimes feels like I’m an archaeologist digging through the layers of an ancient city – if you pay really close attention, you can see which developers wrote which portions of the code. - Larry Osterman
At first glance, business software developers have little in common with Indiana Jones. But the emerging field of software archaeology applies some of the same skills, if not the dashing adventure. - Simon Sharwood
"Software archaeology" conjures up images of people poring over documents in a forgotten language, looking at broken artifacts whose purpose is unknown. - Ralph Johnson
It's been a long couple of days deep in the bit mines.