It seems impossible that, given current economic trajectories, there won't be software archaeology in the future.
It seems impossible that, given current economic trajectories, there won't be software archaeology in the future.
Our abusive relationship with modern commercialism has disintegrated the value of art, folklore and tools, both in the eyes of consumers and producers, and we no longer as a society seek to preserve the greatest works of today's most cutting-edge mediums. It's quite a sad state of affairs, which will only be mourned with increasing intensity as time marches on and curious researchers try to piece together the early days of the internet and personal computing.
In the more common case, it's simply archiving -- we still have hardware it can run on (e.g. x86).
The GPGPU and ML stuff is likely going to age poorer, although at least we had the sense to funnel most high level code through standardized APIs and libraries.