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.”
Post was last modified on 16 Jan 2023 12:21 pm
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