[1]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 [2]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.
To compare programming languages with natural languages is a little
heretical in computer science, but I'm not sure why that is. The
development of the theory of programming languages was, after all,
spurred on by the early work of Noam Chomsky.
Thus, for example, Donald Knuth took Chomsky's book on structural
linguistics with him on his honeymoon. In spite of this Don is still
married to Jill, 45 years later: when you have dinner with the
Knuths you talk more about quilting and printing Lutheran bibles
than programming, but it all seems of a piece.
I mention Knuth because, of all the Old Masters of computer science,
he is the one most interested in the relationship between computer
programs and texts. Could we even suggest that a program is a text?
It is, after all, a written expression of creativity. Certainly,
when running, a computer game can be an artistic experience in the
same way that a film, or a play can. But my concern here is not
whether the program is art when it runs. I'm talking about whether
its source code is a text. We could go down a bit of a rabbit-hole
here about playful literary theories. Umberto Eco once reviewed a
new Italian banknote as a work of art, describing it as a numbered,
limited edition of engravings. But let's concede that a functional
document like a shopping list or a spreadsheet of student names is
not a literary text. On the other hand, a recipe by a literary cook
like Elizabeth David might be art, even though it also has function.
Perhaps the relevant question is: can we experience a program as a
text? Can we, in the fullest sense of the word, read it?
A cynical answer might be that if program source codes are texts,
why can't you buy them in a bookshop?
[3]Inform: Past, Present, Future [Graham Nelson/Emshort]
(via [4]Four Short Links)
(Via [5]Boing Boing)
Delightful! I still play these games, both the classic Infocom releases
as well as the modern gems. Well, I play them when I can. They have
(mostly) infinite patience.
Also on:
[6]Twitter
__________________________________________________________________
My original entry is here: [7]The history of a Zorklike programming
interpreter is a tale of language, art, code and literature. It posted
Fri, 05 Oct 2018 15:01:50 +0000.
Filed under: culture,
References
1.
https://boingboing.net/2018/10/01/code-is-text.html
2.
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/27/corner-cases-everywhere.html
3.
http://www.emshort.com/ifmu/inform.html
4.
https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links
5.
https://boingboing.net/feed
6.
https://twitter.com/prjorgensen/status/1048227614182309888
7.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=2101
