Software Resurrection: Discovering Programming Pearls by Showing Modernity to Historical Software

Reading computer program code and documentation written by others is, we are told, one of the best ways to learn the art of writing readable, intelligible and maintainable code and documentation. The software resurrection exercise, introduced in this paper, requires a motivated learner to compile and test a historical release (e.g. 20 years old) version of a well maintained and widely adopted open source software on a modern hardware and software platform. The learner develops fixes for the issues encountered during compilation and testing of the software on a platform that could not have been foreseen at the time of its release. The exercise concludes by writing a critique which provides an opportunity to critically reflect on the experience of maintaining the historical software. An illustrative example of the software resurrection exercise pursued on a version of the SQLite database engine released 20 years ago shows that software engineering principles (or, programming pearls) emerge during the reflective learning cycle of the software resurrection exercise. The concept of software resurrection has the potential to lay foundations for a lifelong willingness to explore and learn from existing code and documentation.