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Would a technical description in plain English (specification) and C code be sufficient to preserve a piece of software? The understanding of the specification

Would a technical description in plain English (specification) and C code be sufficient to preserve a piece of software? The understanding of the specification may be different years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of fiction. So, the question is not only about the preservation the actual software, but also about its correct interpretation.

vharuck 4y ago
Sort of like how the valuable parts of math textbooks are the theorems and proofs, with the problem sets (i.e. implementations) being nice but arbitrary extras?
- jayhoon 4y ago
  This is an interesting angle on essentially the same problem. Can a set of theorems about the prime numbers lead another group of people to the RSA encryption, for example? Considering that Clifford Cocks invented a similar system 4 years before Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (and even before Diffie and Hellman published their cryptosystem), the answer seems to be "yes". On the other hand, that 4 year difference means that people have to be ready for the idea, i.e., work on their "problem sets".
cableshaft 4y ago
I think for simpler games this idea works well, yeah (and I tend to design simpler games, so I might have to start doing something like this). One of my old games, Proximity, ended up in a couple chapters on a book on an old book about Flash development, I think it was called Actionscript 3 Design Patterns. You could make the original game pretty close from there (even though it was someone else that reverse engineered it and did it somewhat differently, it still got the job done). But that game is pretty darn simple, just a hex grid where you draw a tile from 1-20, and wherever you place it, it'll capture tiles of an opposing team surrounding it if the tile you placed has a higher number than them. I've worked on tweaking the formula in a bunch of a ways over the years, but that's the core mechanism. Once a game gets complicated enough it gets a lot harder to ensure that all of the nuances in the code, edge cases, hacky shit to get the game out the door, etc, so it's going to be more limited. But I'd still love to see a series that did this for more games though (I know one guy did it with the Quake source code and a couple other Id games).
GrinningFool 4y ago
> The understanding of the specification may be different years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of fiction. That's an interesting parallel. But for it to be equivalent, I think it would have to be to the method of creating those paintings/works of fiction. Instead of passing down the Mona Lisa, you're passing painstakingly detailed instructions detailing how to make the Mona Lisa.

vharuck 4y ago

Sort of like how the valuable parts of math textbooks are the theorems and proofs, with the problem sets (i.e. implementations) being nice but arbitrary extras?

jayhoon 4y ago
This is an interesting angle on essentially the same problem. Can a set of theorems about the prime numbers lead another group of people to the RSA encryption, for example? Considering that Clifford Cocks invented a similar system 4 years before Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (and even before Diffie and Hellman published their cryptosystem), the answer seems to be "yes". On the other hand, that 4 year difference means that people have to be ready for the idea, i.e., work on their "problem sets".

cableshaft 4y ago

I think for simpler games this idea works well, yeah (and I tend to design simpler games, so I might have to start doing something like this). One of my old games, Proximity, ended up in a couple chapters on a book on an old book about Flash development, I think it was called Actionscript 3 Design Patterns. You could make the original game pretty close from there (even though it was someone else that reverse engineered it and did it somewhat differently, it still got the job done). But that game is pretty darn simple, just a hex grid where you draw a tile from 1-20, and wherever you place it, it'll capture tiles of an opposing team surrounding it if the tile you placed has a higher number than them. I've worked on tweaking the formula in a bunch of a ways over the years, but that's the core mechanism. Once a game gets complicated enough it gets a lot harder to ensure that all of the nuances in the code, edge cases, hacky shit to get the game out the door, etc, so it's going to be more limited. But I'd still love to see a series that did this for more games though (I know one guy did it with the Quake source code and a couple other Id games).

GrinningFool 4y ago

> The understanding of the specification may be different years later, but this applies even to the paintings and the works of fiction. That's an interesting parallel. But for it to be equivalent, I think it would have to be to the method of creating those paintings/works of fiction. Instead of passing down the Mona Lisa, you're passing painstakingly detailed instructions detailing how to make the Mona Lisa.