The history of a Zorklike programming interpreter is a tale of language, art, code and literature

The heroic age of text adventure games was dominated by Zork and Zorkalikes, many from the games studio Infocom; the text adventures' fortunes sagged when improvements in computer graphics lowered the average gamer's age, and then rose again when BBSes carved new spaces for text-based play.

The legacy of those games is the "interactive fiction" artform, which is largely practiced by programming in "Inform," a highly idiosyncratic programming language whose principal maintainer, Graham Nelson, is a deep thinker on the intersection of computing and art, and whose delightful essay (the transcript of a speech) on the history of Inform is an utterly captivating meditation on the way that code can be literature, and the role that artistic and technical choices have in the literary form of software.

One important characteristic of Inform is its ability to tolerate ambiguity in the categories it relies on: the edge-cases and corner-cases in seemingly obvious categories can quickly grow to eclipse the category itself (date, time, addresses, names, obscenity, gender, etc). This makes it especially good for storytelling and other forms of narrative art.

Also fascinating is Nelson's professed embarrassment over the state of his source code, a mess that he blames for the closed source status of Inform (though there are lots of programmers who have this problem, Nelson is the one who has devoted his career to promoting code as a literary form intended to be consumed by other humans!).

Nelson closes with the roadmap for improvements to Inform, which he would like see forming a backend for apps and websites, which is something I would find absolutely delightful. Read the rest