Software Nostalgia: State of the Art on Software Preservation

Technological progress combined with continuous competitiveness in the business environment has created a pressing need for product innovation, especially digital products, that are increasingly efficient and intuitive for community use. This is where the term obsolescence comes from, often referring to all those tools that in turn represented technological progress, but that are now “old”, because tools with higher energy, material, and manual efficiency have overtaken them. In this regard, the preservation of software and programming languages is essential to maintain scientific, industrial, and above all cultural identity. However, the recovery and maintenance of old codes presents significant challenges, not only because of outdated syntax and lack of documentation but also because of the cognitive complexity involved in interpreting unknown coding paradigms. The following article aims to reflect on software preservation, underlining its importance and exploring the historical solutions adopted. A section is dedicated to listing the major software preservation projects. Finally, a discussion is devoted to the use of modern approaches, including natural language processing.