
Inform: Past, Present, Future - homarp
http://www.emshort.com/ifmu/inform.html
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chipotle_coyote
Since it may not be entirely clear from the title:

\- Inform is a language for writing interactive fiction. Inform 7, the current
version, is also a really fascinating declarative programming language. Its
quasi-English look appears to be just syntactic sugar at first glance, but
there's more going on than you might think.

\- Even if you're not interested in interactive fiction, per se, this is a
really good, thoughtful presentation on programming languages in general from
Inform's creator, who is a mathematics fellow at Oxford and an award-winning
poet. (It is not surprising at all that he appears to be friends with Donald
Knuth.)

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thrower123
Inform is a fun little thing. I have to say, I much prefer the old Inform 6,
that was basically C-ish, to Inform 7. Trying to write something feels very
squishy and indistinct, and I never am quite sure if what I think I'm
instructing is what I think it is. It's a little on the magic side, sort of
like other natural language DSLs (e.g. Cucumber).

Guess the verb and satisfying the parser is a time-honored part of _playing_
interactive fiction; I'm not really sold on the idea of it being a core part
of _authoring_ it.

~~~
rabidrat
Same here. It was straightforward, until I wanted to just make a simple "bank
account" concept (you receive credits for completing certain tasks, and then
you can spend credits for other purposes). Maybe there is a reasonable way to
do it and I just didn't know the language well enough, but because it's
English, I found it difficult to even know what else to try, besides arranging
my sentence structures to look more like the examples.

It does make reading the source of an IF game really intuitive though. You can
basically hand your (structurally finished) game to a writer and they can
edit/extend it.

~~~
hellbanner
It does support the concept of score, maybe score points + score negative
points?

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smacktoward
_> The 1990s were a propitious time for this sort of hobby computing. There
were really two computing bubbles in this era. The one people talk about was
the dot-com boom, when the potential of websites hit the venture capital
market, and startups like Amazon got going. The other was an almost
ideologically opposite sort of economy, with the rise of Linux, Perl and
Apache, a market in which your wealth, in the form of public standing, was
proportional to how much you had given to the community, in the form of code.
Jeff Bezos got to be a billionaire out of the 90s, but thanks to my software,
I got to marry Emily Short, so you could say we both got to be the world’s
richest man._

Awwww :-D

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irrational
"when you have dinner with the Knuths you talk more about quilting and
printing Lutheran bibles than programming"

This made me laugh for some reason. I guess everyone needs their hobbies.

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SolarNet
As some one who played around with inform and would recommend it to authors
looking for new ways to express their creativity, I am glad it looks like it
is getting a significant tooling upgrade. Especially important is that this
lowers the barrier of entry for new micro-payment strategies (like apps and
websites).

It's also really cool because it looks like someone could hook this thing up
to ray tracer or modern game engine and render dynamic myst style scenes with
it (but with NPCs and significantly more detail in manipulation).

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eggy
I think with the current indiepocalypse of game development, and Netflix
creating CYOA type shows, IF is due for a surge in popularity and demand.
Who's going to orchestrate those Netflix shows? They better have a good sense
of IF mechanics.

