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PaulHoule | on: The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)
Inform 7 is a fascinating case study. There are a lot of really neat ideas in it such as “default driven development” but in the end it doesn’t succeed at being a way English majors can write interactive fiction because it takes the same discipline to write Inform 7 that it takes to write ordinary programs.

I like the idea that the code looks like English and is therefore readable, long ago I pitched a plan to make an “Inform 7 for European Air Traffic Regulations” where that readability was a big plus.

AlienRobot | parent | next
To be fair, Inform7 can't succeed, generally, because there is no market for the kind of games that you create with Inform7. Even if I was going to create a game like the kind you can make in Inform7 today from scratch while trying to keep more or less the same UI, I'd still want to add things that the emulators don't support natively, like some way to quickly tell which commands you can type.

That's not even considering the fact that in practice if you were to make a proper game like that today, you wouldn't choose text input because of mobile. You would have some sort of touch input instead.

I do want to say that I like the fact that a game made in Inform7 is a file that runs on a separate emulator, and some browser-based implementation even exist. It's kind of like Java, or kind of like a webpage.

I wish there was something like that for small games in general. An application that you can download to your computer that runs a game file sandboxed, so you can safely play random games that aren't browser games because the environment doesn't provide an API for arbitrary file access. That's pretty much what I wish Flash was, as well.