This has been a fascinating thread and I’m sure it’s one of many just like it.
I agree that although Graham doesn’t OWE anyone anything, technically, the way he’s engaging with the project and the community is still cause to mourn/grieve for me personally.
Why Inform 7 is Important to Me
Inform 7 is an utterly unique language. It’s probably the closest thing there is to a programming language that is written (very roughly) IN the English language. Another notable example is the Gherkin language used in BDD, but it uses a MUCH more restricted subset of English. The reason Inform 7 is so well suited to this unique style is because it describes worlds and an English Language parser to interact with them.
In addition, Inform 7 is an important bridge between the past and the future. It compiles, ultimately, to a similar executable format as old historical parser-based games like the Infocom games, keeping tools that run those games relevant and worthwhile, alongside all the newer hobbyist/creative games.
Why Graham’s Decisions Feel a Bit Harmful
So Graham made the decision to do this monolithic change as a prerequisite of open-sourcing Inform 7, and he made the decision to be the second implementor (I think?) of a new and idealistic programming methodology (Literate Programming) as a part of his rewrite. He clearly mis-apprehended the scope of the task by a few orders of magnitude.
In the meantime, any kind of feature development or bug fixing on the language has ground to a halt. The tooling is beginning to age a bit, and it’s all starting to become subject to a little bit of bitrot. Because of the uncertainty and missed self-imposed-deadlines (by two years!) I feel like interest in the language is beginning to wane in some ways.
There is this incredible corpus of community knowledge about the language and I’m worried that’s going to die out and become damaged by this communication-less delay. Sure Graham doesn’t owe us anything but I’ve invested time helping people solve problems in Inform7, promoting it, writing some novel documentation for it, and as the hope that this is actually going to happen begins to wane and Inform 7 starts to look increasingly like it might become a beautiful dead end instead of a real part of the future of Interactive Fiction.
In that way I feel like Graham is letting me and people like me down with the incredibly sporadic communication and gigantic mis-estimations. I feel like I’m watching something beautiful begin to die before my eyes because someone is clearly letting “perfect be the enemy of good”.
I absolutely recognize that it’s his ship to tank, but he’s definitely harming the community of people who rallied around this tool and supported it, extended it, promoted it, and with it his reputation.
I am in NO WAY saying I have a recommended course of action for him like others do. I get he’s arms deep in this giant project and doesn’t feel like anyone can meaningfully help. I’m sure he has other work and it’s got to be tough for him to find the psychological strength to keep facing this. I can’t help grieving at the damage I think it’s doing to something I find really beautiful however.
He won’t even see this message so it hardly matters. But I’ve been moved by all your comments and think about this a great deal and wanted to share how I felt.