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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

Inform 7 will forever be the best language, not because it's a good language, but because of the way programmers react when you present them a page of Inform 7 code.

https://github.com/I7-Examples/Bronze/blob/main/Bronze.infor...

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I wrote a few games using Inform 7 and ran a couple of workshops for it too.

It's not just the technical idiosyncrasies of the language. I've noticed that if you use it for the few hours and get into "the zone", you start to inhabit the world that you're creating and "see" it. The overall attitude is that of a world creator rather than a programmer fixing technical issues. Breaking the flow is trying to figure out how to handle an array or something like that. I liked the experience and this idea that the nature of the language will affect how you interact with it and hence the DX is, I think, not fully explored.

I don't know Inform 7 much, but I'm trying my best to make Loreline language syntax never get in the way of the writing and thinking process. Kept refining it since 2024 and this is still an ongoing process. I'm hoping that it will resonate to other writers too!

I don't do much IF these days and I'm not sure if I will but if I do ever have time to sit down with something new, I will definitely give Loreline a try.

This, more than anything else I'd ever read about Inform, really makes me want to give it a try.

Thanks. You should. I remember something I read about a teacher who asked kids to write little interactive fiction pieces using Inform 7 set in different parts of the school and then he stitched them all together into a large story and they could all play it. Everyone's imagination comes to life. You wander into the parking lot and some kid has created a portal there into a mirror universe. I don't know if I'm misremembering or the work involved but it's definitely feasible and not something you can do with a regular programming language easily in such an open ended way.

I've always loved interactive fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp is a great watch. "Before the first person shooter, we had the second person thinker." :)

What do you mean, that's just a text file full of prose-

Oh.

Oh no.

(Seriously, that's either very clever and perfectly reasonable, or... Not. Haven't decided which. Guess someone had to follow COBOL's footsteps.)

Edit: Thought about it more, and I've decided that for the intended users that's excellent. In the same way I wish formal proof languages would just use alphanumeric reserved words like a normal programming language, meeting writers closer to home is probably a helpful step that need not have any real downsides assuming you document it well.

Always reminds me of Guy Steele's "Growing a Language" talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE&t=48s

Think it's a great fit for IF alright.

I've spent time with various versions of Inform, and bounced off of Inform 7 fairly hard, for the same reasons that I bounced off of AppleScript years ago: it's a read-only language. Which is to say, the English phrases you use read well...but are hard to remember and hard to look up.

I'm sure it's possible to become highly fluent if you use it a lot, but I'd much prefer something that didn't use English prose for logic and control.

I wonder if someone's tried IF tools like Inform 7 as the specification language you give an LLM agent. Looks like a good way to describe UI screens.

Would also work very well for "open prompts" interpreted and mapped to one of the available options by a LLM. As some sort of constraints.

It's in the uncanny valley, that's for sure. I never had much luck with it because you have to memorize a ton of specific English phrase templates and remember how they are injected into the game logic, and you often have to escape into regular old procedural logic.

But it's an ambitious experiment, and the docs are worth reading through. Every now and again I give it another try :^P

You're reminding me of trying this out as a teenager; I only got a few connected rooms and basic objects and I distinctly remember always trying to write "a foo is a type of bar" instead of "a foo is a kind of bar" which is what compiles.

Also I tried to show my brother how to use Inform by typing Inform 6 into the fancy new Inform 7 IDE... nope.

I am glad to have checked that one out. I don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified.

To paraphrase a description of inform 7 I once heard in a podcast -

Inform 7 awkwardly pretends to be regular English, similar to how text adventures awkwardly pretend that the player has meaningful freedom to act in the game.

Yes. It brings the experience of playing a text adventure to writing a text adventure.

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