Iron ChIF: Season One Episode 1 (Audience Commentary)

[DeusIrae (Mike Russo)]

@jjmcc

It shouldn’t surprise me that concise math is among its last concerns. It shouldn’t VEX me, and the fact that it does is a reflection of my own quite powerful, quite intrusive, biases.

Oh man do I (or rather does @Zed) have an extension for you!

Code: Inform 7 for the rest of us

Inform 7 has historically been less than accessible to programmers of traditional programming languages. For instance, suppose one were using the Sieve of Eratosthenes to find primes, as one does. Idiomatic Inform 7 might go something like: The limit is initially 100. Divides exactly relates a number to various numbers. The verb to factor means the divides exactly relation. Definition: a number is known to be a product rather than known to be prime if a number relates to it by the divides e…

[jjmcc]

Lol, he had me at

@Zed

Yes, that’s Perl-style regexp syntax,

[bg]

@Zed

What if a room or a whole chunk of the map, broke off from and moved relative to the rest of it? What if some chunk of the map rotated relative to the rest?

@mathbrush

By focusing on a coordinate-style system with a zone of influence spread out in a grid, he’s essentially created a board game with its own rules. This kind of system lends itself to exploration and seeing what kind of fun effects can happen.
[…]
Or, of course, it could be kept a lot simpler, and just affect an open map in a small neighborhood. But if that’s the case, why let it influence nearby rooms, if the player could just carry it around and see what changes? There must be something there. Maybe a room where the player can’t bring in the scroll, but can leave it nearby?

Now I’m imagining a scenario where the scroll can’t move, but the rooms can, and you have to rearrange the rooms so that the scroll can affect the right rooms.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@lpsmith

An hour later, my alarm still hadn’t gone off, and I had everything mapped out: what the unknown scrolls would do, how they would make the chase scene even more complicated but maybe manageable, what to do with a not-yet-introduced NPC, how to get to the final showdown, what options the player would find there.

I was so worried that the next paragraph would start with “…then I got up and couldn’t remember a single word of it”!

[Zed (Zed Lopez)]

I found one of the most interesting outcomes from Code to be finding that the idiomatic Inform version Eratosthenes’ Sieve wasn’t notably longer than the codier version and I found it much easier to follow.

Osmosian is a fellow traveler to inform, and the The Osmosian Order of Plain English Programmers blog has (toward the bottom) some provocative examples of natural language implementations of various tasks that are clearer and shorter than traditional alternatives, including things where one would expect the latter to have an edge.

[Dissolved]

@Draconis

I was so worried that the next paragraph would start with “…then I got up and couldn’t remember a single word of it”!

Up next, @lpsmith vs a man from Porlock.

[VictorGijsbers]

I had to look this up, but love it!

[Dissolved]

@VictorGijsbers

do we want absinth-quaffing artistes whose pursuit of their sublime visions makes them exclaim, and I quote: “I am going to die”?!

I thought this was Iron ChIF, not RimbaudComp!

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@jjmcc

I can absinthe until I hurl like a Frat Boy!

That’s about my experience with absinthe, yeah.

[Dissolved]

From this, we can deduce that likers of Sumerian antiquaries disfavour anise.

[rovarsson]

IF Author in Conversation with The Game:

Viktor Oliva’s Le Buveur d’Absynthe

“So, you think I should put the rainbow-tortoise in, yeah? And when the scroll opens it changes colours which means the walls reflect my face but different? And then the fairy-queen will make a portal to coordinates X5-Y8 where there’s a pot of magic soup bubbling on the green fire?
Great idea!”

[severedhand]

@rovarsson

Viktor Oliva’s Le Buveur d’Absynthe

Huh, I never saw that painting before. My popcorn gallery response is – Damn, Absinthe is hot!

-Wade

[severedhand]

Re: @jjmcc 's Inform maths comments, remember that Mr Nelson is postgraduate in maths. I’m sort of waiting for @mathbrush to chime in on this topic, since he’s made Inform games just to exploit supported mathematical functions that were going unused.

-Wade

[severedhand]

@VictorGijsbers

Do we want a bunch of squares who implement solid project management advice and avoid scope creep, or do we want absinth-quaffing artistes whose pursuit of their sublime visions makes them exclaim, and I quote: “I am going to die”?!

Yeah, B all the way.

-Wade

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@mathbrush

Inform is a strange land when it comes to math. I tend to be wary around it when using negatives or decimals. I frequently have to look up how to word comparisons and additions. Dialog is, woefully, not any better, and perhaps worse.

Distinctly worse. Inform lets you use equations to say things like “let x be given by x=(-b+sqrt(b^2-4ac))/2a”; Dialog has no such shorthands, and also no support for floating-point or negative numbers.

Dialog is much better than Inform at manipulating lists, but much, much worse when it comes to numbers.

[severedhand]

@Afterward

The code-generating code is of course written in Inform 7.

Yeah, sometimes I use Inform loops etc. to write Inform code (or even text files for some other purpose) that would be a bit tedious to all do manually. Before I used Inform to do this, I’d open an Apple II emulator and do it in BASIC.

-Wade

[Dissolved]

@jjmcc

This is an Iron ChIF, seemingly drunk on his own potency, showcasing the featured language’s ability to generate code in the featured language.

RIP macro languages like m4.

[VictorGijsbers]

@Dissolved

I thought this was Iron ChIF, not RimbaudComp!

I’m sorry for the confusing cultural crossover. Let’s just say that we want sake-quaffing visionaries like Murasaki Shikibu who do not worry about scope creep!

(If anyone ever did not worry about scope creep, it was Lady Murasaki. “So far, Genji has five lovers and the reader has a hard time keeping them all apart in their minds because I try to avoid using anything as simple as names… okay, past time for number six!”)

Edit: forgot the crucial word ‘not’ in the second sentence…

[severedhand]

@VictorGijsbers

Oooh, I thought the ChIF was just showing us some side programme he uses to efficiently create code. You think that it might be part of the game itself? Surely not?

I feel historically, it has not been the Iron Chif’s style to be plonking meta stuff front and centre. It may be all garnishy, but not the main game.

Now admittedly, this is only episode one after the pilot, so Keyboard Stadium battles have a much shorter history. But my suspicion is that doing something as radical as CMG was speculating about based on what Ryan shared would not be what I might describe as “moving to win”. And I do suspect the Iron Chif wants to win the battle.

-Wade

[bg]

@Afterward

say "Underst";
	repeat with x running from 1 to number of words in normal name:
		let xtext be word number x in normal name;
		say "and '[xtext]' ";

@VictorGijsbers

exploiting the fact that the word “understand” ends with the word “and”

Ooh, fancy!