InForm Screencast
1.
Emily Short was kind enough to post to her blog to publicize my call for interest in an Interactive Fiction Workshop at next year's Penguicon. The current poll results:
What would your ideal Inform workshop cover?
Basics: setting started and overview of IDE 13% (16 votes)
Writing short tutorial game together 24% (30 votes)
Language concepts (rules, activities) 21% (26 votes)
Programming techniques (writing for extensions, debugging) 13% (16 votes)
Specific advanced implementation topic (characters, scene-heavy plots) 20% (25 votes)
Freeform clinic for WIP problems 7% (9 votes)
Other: 2% (2 votes)
2.
The InForm website has been renovated with the domain name of inform-7.com. It was never a slacker to begin with, but now it's even better.
3.
On the new site, Interactive Fiction author Aaron Reed has created a screencast of how to use InForm to create your own interactive fiction. I've described InForm before in glowing terms, but seeing is believing.
Inform 7 Introductory Screencast from Aaron Reed on Vimeo.
The InForm language is a subset of a little language that the world likes to call English. The tools built in to the development environment do an incredible job of removing every low-level chore and walking you through whatever you want to do. If you're a creative person who wants to make your work of the imagination into an interactive experience, you can jump right in.
4.
At Penguicon this year, Andrew Plotkin will give a talk about how the InForm language was created to be a subset of English. I suspect it will probably touch on the concept of "literate programming".
It seems to share Guido Van Rossum's philosophy from when he created the Python programming language: You are going to do a lot more reading and editing other people's code than you are going to write code yourself, therefore systems should push you to write in a way someone else can understand.
From what I have read so far, Literate Programming is like a rigorous documentation methodology, interspersing comments in LaTeX with the code scripts, in such a sequence that it follows human logic rather than the computer process. You then run the "tangle" command to generate the latest version of the compilable source code, and the "weave" command to generate the latest version of the documentation displaying how every file of source code interacts with every other file in every folder.
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