Coding by playing

[vivdunstan]

Back to Inform interactive fiction text adventure coding, and there's something really magical about trying early stages of the game myself as a player, thinking "This is the experience I want the player to have here", then coding it, replaying to try it out myself, tweaking and so on. Like alchemy! It is a phenomenally iterative process, and it does take time. But it's stupidly fun. I never had this much fun with programming during my computer science degree, when we learned loads of languages and IDEs. This is just brill.

Comments

[andrewducker]

It's always great to find something that clicks for you like that.

[vivdunstan]

It's lovely, yes! I know some people who've been trained like me in traditional imperative programming languages don't take so well to the natural language declarative style of Inform. But I really like it, and it's ridiculously good fun. It probably helps that I studied Prolog for umpteen years long ago. Martin is jealous when I'm coding in it, and wishing his work coding was so much fun to write in!