I found an old chess program that Mark Watson (somehow I can’t find the original link anymore, my Gist mirroring it is here). I was wondering what it would take to get it to run again, and I was shocked to find out that when I copy-pasted it in, loaded the file, it … it just worked !!
This is not supposed to happen, really. Code from 28 years ago isn’t supposed to just run. I don’t need to talk about how even Python code from 10 years ago would require some work to run.
Also notable is the lack of required scaffolding in terms of makefiles, build tools or anything of the sort. Yes, you could imagine breaking the code up, but it’s just 585 lines. Drop it in and load the code, and you’re good to go. No extensions, shims, nothing.
As proof, here is a short transcript of me playing terribly with it.
Abacus Noir 