If you're a writer, you've probably thought from time to time of trying your hand at a piece of interactive fiction, but soon been discouraged by the right-brain orientation of your mind that makes it practically impossible for you to grok the code necessary to make your story come alive. The latest iteration of the Inform platform, Inform 7, is trying to change all that with it's supposed "natural language" programming code.

Here's some actual source code from the new system:

The warning sign is scenery in the Entrance Hall. The description of the warning sign is "You know the words by heart, having heard them first from your father, and then studied them yourself on many more recent occasions." The printing of the sign is "Those who seek to leave the castle depart at peril of their lives and souls, unless another servant be provided in exchange, or a fixed term of absence be granted by their master." Understand "old" or "familiar" as the sign

At first blush, that looks a lot easier to understand than the more standardly esoteric variety of source code. Still, once you get over the fact that you can understand it even without programming knowledge, it starts looking pretty clunky — it may be "natural language," but that doesn't change the fact that people just don't write like that. Longer blocks of source code are even more convolutedly phrased.

Ultimately, it's still pretty cool. Almost enough to make us write that IF game we always dreamed about, before discarding our ambitions because IF games suck.

Inform 7