In 2026, Software Heritage is celebrating its 10th anniversary. To mark this milestone, Software Heritage and Inria have decided to set up a special display: a Source Code Exhibition.
The exhibition takes an unusual approach – treating source code as the central exhibit, not merely as contextual material. Source code, beyond its technical purpose, holds rich layers of meaning. It can reveal the intentions of its author, reflect the historical, social, and cultural context of its creation, and even express personal style, creativity, or aesthetic choices.
The exhibition aims to display a diverse range of voices and perspectives – including scholars, practitioners, scientists, activists, artists, and more. We disseminated a call for contributions and received many proposals. The exhibition committee selected fifteen contributions, covering three thematic axes: Source Code as Historical Testimony, Source Code as a Mirror of Society, and Source Code as Cultural Artifact.
Through this variety, we hope to illustrate the many dimensions through which source code can be understood and appreciated. The exhibition is intended as a starting point to foster engagement and discussion around the place of source code in society, and around the challenge of encouraging interaction with it beyond its technical aspects.
Historical Testimony
Since then, programming practices have evolved tremendously, as has the range of applications computers can run. Recovered historical code offers a valuable window into these technical and social transformations.
Exploring the first programming textbooks or Turing’s innovative sonic debugging techniques reveals the complexity of programming early screenless machines and the ingenuity of their creators. Although the first computers were devoted to numerical tasks, researchers quickly ventured into other domains – illustrated by ELIZA, the first chatbot, created in the mid-1960s.
Mirror of Society
Code is a form of text, and coding is a type of writing.
Therefore, a code exhibition is above all, about the underlying processes and the context in which the code was produced.
For now, coding is done primarily by human beings. They integrate code into their scientific practices, transforming their relationship to centuries-old fields such as medicine. They adapt to corporate cultures and constraints or, conversely, resist regulations and laws perceived as arbitrary. Code also transforms the way we interact with each other, as shown in large-scale open-source software projects, and with our environment.
Programmers come from diverse backgrounds, cultures, ages, and gender identities. These differences inevitably shape the genesis of code and the final product. By reading source code, one can open a small window into the world of the programmers and understand how these differences manifest themselves. At the same time, like any other text, source code shapes society – it carries biases, norms, and assumptions of its time, but also contributes to producing them.
Cultural Artifact
Code, like spoken or written language, can be a medium for aesthetic expression.
From stylistic differences between programmers to poems written by anonymous Perl coders, it offers a unique set of creative constraints. Source code is both univocal and ambivalent: it does not tolerate ambiguity in its interpretation, yet must remain intelligible to both machines and humans. As such, it exists as a cultural form, seen in playful esoteric languages, contests to create the most obfuscated programs, or elegantly written pieces of computer malware.
But source code also exists within culture. Written by humans embedded in specific imaginaries and practices, it reflects the context in which it is produced. It can, for instance, express hacker culture, where technical knowledge and skills are intertwined with insider jokes, or reflect feminist struggles when code becomes a means of artistic and political expression. In a broader sense, it arises from a largely homogeneous population – predominantly white, male, and located in the Global North – one in which non-English speech is often treated as an oddity and gender imbalances remain firmly entrenched.
