Travel Progress
We got on the road a little after midnight. Now we are at a rest station with free open WiFi at the Iowa/Nebraska border.
David Adams is my favorite person most days, due to the laptop he gave me, and today is especially so. It has been nearly a year since I last used InForm, and I have resumed my efforts in it on the laptop in the car, between driving, and naps. InForm is a wonderful program in which you can write your own Interactive Fiction, i.e. text adventures. For ease of use, quality documentation, almost supernaturally helpful error messages, InForm might be my favorite piece of software ever. The source code of InForm is a subset of English. I am continuing to gain proficiency in it to enhance SimPenguicon, my gargantuan project of unmanageable scale. Fortunately today I invented a new, much smaller Interactive Fiction that I can actually finish.
While my thoughts are on traveling: the convention I would be willing to travel to is any convention that gives me an Interactive Fiction workshop led by Graham Nelson, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin. I must give thought and investigation to whether their fans are interested in organizing such an event with me.
Comments
atropis on Feb. 25, 2009 4:00 AM
denver, you said? if you need native tour guides, fop and madwolf are generally pleased to offer local bar tours and the like.
Anonymous on Feb. 26, 2009 2:01 PM
As a programming language, how do you like Inform 7? Have you ever worked with Inform 6 (which looks much more like you'd expect a programming language to look)? I wrote some very small things in 7 a year or two and found the syntax difficult -- places where I would put commas in normal prose caused syntax errors unless they were left out, for example -- but very able to do some useful and complex things fairly simply.
loop-bell on Feb. 26, 2009 2:02 PM
That was me, having forgotten to log in, but not having realized it.
matt-arnold on Feb. 26, 2009 7:01 PM
I've never worked with Inform 6 or previous.
As a programming language, how do you like Inform 7?
I would not attempt to make an evaluation on that level at all, since it is by no means a universal system as most programming languages are. Inform is very domain-specific.
I think the Inform framework and documentation is a masterpiece in accessibility from which we can take valuable lessons. This has to do with my swimming-pool philosophy. It is possible to do meaningful work from early learning in Inform and have something interesting to show for it. That is the shallow end of the swimming pool.
Web frameworks, content management systems, any system intended to make it easier to author things and just focus on the creative content-- these need a shallow end of the swimming pool, making it painless and fruitful to get one's feet wet, and someday go high-diving. Heck, I'd even like to see a command-line shell take lessons from this.
By contrast, in a completely flexible and universal system, usually nothing I do in the learning stage is useful, and therefore somewhat demotivating and less fun.
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