Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building" argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it. If you lose the people, you lose the program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it's lossy, so you can't reconstruct
I have a pet project I work on, every now and then. CNoEvil.
The concept is simple enough.
What if, for a moment, we forgot all the rules we know. That we ignore every good idea, and accept all the terrible ones. That nothing is off limits. Can we turn C into a new language? Can we do what Lisp and Forth let the over-eager programmer do, but in C?