What I call software collapse is what is more commonly referred to as software rot: the fact that software stops working eventually if is not actively maintained. The rot/maintenance metaphor is not appropriate in my opinion because it blames the phenomenon on the wrong part. Software does not disintegrate with time. It stops working because the foundations on which it was built start to move.

This is why I build my personal projects in PHP even though I'm not really a fan. I use PHP and JQuery. It'll work basically forever and I can come back to it in 15 years and it'll still work.

our culture and our institutions do not reward reproducibility

Even notebooks still are problematic, for example, this study found that only 25% of Jupyter notebooks could be executed, and of those, only 4% actually reproduced the same results.

IMO: one of the biggest problems in modern softwaredevelopment• Code breaks constantly, even if it doesn’t change• Huge cause of reliability issues and time wasted• This is somehow accepted as normal

the published journal article, or some supplementary material to that article, contains a precise enough human-readable description of the algorithms that a scientist competent in the field can write a new implementation from scratch

the poor reproducibility of Python-based computer-aided research

explicit documentation of both the execution environment used to run the software and all requirements and dependencies of systems, software, and libraries should be clearly noted in the code and/or readme file (Benureau and Rougier 2018). While time passing can make software obsolete, it also fades the memories of researchers. For that reason alone, it is important to annotate source code to explain the intended operations, which supports reproducibility for the original research team while also supporting future reusers (Benureau and Rougier 2018)

today’s notebook implementations require note-book authors to take various precautions to ensure repro-ducibility, which are exactly the same as required for makingscripts reproducible: a detailed documentation of the soft-ware environment that was used, listing all dependencieswith detailed version information

What I call software collapse is what is more commonly referred to as software rot: the fact that software stops working eventually if is not actively maintained. The rot/maintenance metaphor is not appropriate in my opinion because it blames the phenomenon on the wrong part. Software does not disintegrate with time. It stops working because the foundations on which it was built start to move.

even if the code has been made available, it cannotbe easily run because of changes in the underlyinglibraries, operating systems, and other dependen-cies

Not only this. Try to change the app two years later. Dependencies gone, wrong NPM version, Webpack config depricated and what not.That's why I like to use vanilla JS as much as possible. It will be maintainable years later.

A couple years ago, I tried to use the Java Whyline. It crashed when faced with modern Java bytecode.

This project will be great for instruction and portable reproducible science

There are currently three implementations of the ActivePapers concept: the Python edition, the JVM edition, and the Pharo edition