[warning26]

Inform 7 code is interesting from a conceptual perspective —- “How could we build a programming language that looked like natural language?”

In practice though, I think it ultimately falls into some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.

[082349872349872]

> some kind of uncanny valley, where it’s just enough like natural language that it seems like a certain sentence or grammatical construction should work, but it doesn’t.

Luckily, the target audience of Inform are people who like adventure games (people who are used to playing "guess the verb").

[dwheeler]

There is definitely a lot of fiddling with the text when writing, because you aren't really writing in English but instead a programming language.

On the other hand, the results can be remarkably readable, and in a fascinating way. As an example, here's a small game I wrote using it:

https://dwheeler.com/accuse/source.html

I don't know if there's a lesson to be learned, but as someone who's learned many programming languages, Inform 7 is intriguingly different.

[skerit]

There's a popular programming language for writing Minecraft plugins in called "Skript", it also looks like "natural language" and I find it jarring to use.

[andsoitis]

If the end result is Literate Programming, that's worth learning their programming language, yes?