Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages – you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well, if Inform is a cathedral, its explicit support for extensions is the equivalent of inviting the townsfolk in to set up their stalls.

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I do want to make Inform accessible to a wider community. The manual says that it is for “computer programmers intrigued by writing, and writers intrigued by computer programming”, but truthfully, I’d like to see IF tools – not just design systems, but also iTunes-like browsers and interpreters – which open up IF to that huge creative community of people who write blogs, and design their own websites, often startlingly well. IF will never be for everyone, but I would like it to be on the table as a viable form of artistic expression.–Graham Nelson —[Graham Nelson and Emily Short discuss Inform 7] (Society for the Promotion of Advengure Games)

Nelson is here referring to Eric Raymond’s hymn to the open source movement, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”