Not trying litigate anything, but yeah maybe the question deserves its own thread. It goes beyond Inform. Generally, I’m interested in the conflict between the writer flow state and the programmer flow state that arises when creating IF and how various platforms and practices work to mitigate that. My position is that Inform is likely to have less of that conflict due to the natural language interface.
Is there a writer/programmer flow state problem that needs to be solved?
I can think of examples where a writer is not a strong programmer and vice versa, but I’m not so sure an author (who’s competent in both domains) feels friction when going back and forth between the two.
Give me an example of what you’re thinking of and how natural language syntax solves that problem.
Ah, COBOL… that name brings back memories of the difficulties of searching for a missing full-stop when reviewing “code” printed on “recycled” fan-folded printout paper that included dark flecks in it… “is that dark spot at the end of that line a full-stop or a fleck in the paper??” lol
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I know, but the metaphor is really strong. COBOL was designed with natural language processing in mind. ADD THIS TO THAT could be legitimate COBOL.
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MULTIPLY A BY B GIVING C.
The original idea was for programmers to write code their managers could read or so I heard 
Did a COBOL programming course at uni a loooong time ago and never touched the language since (with the exception of trying to create a BASIC interpreter for a friend once who got their hands on a mini computer which could only be programmed in COBOL).
You know, I think you’re on to something about tooling here. I prefer TADS but workbench is so old I end up using vscode with the tads extension installed, even on Windows where workbench is an option. Vscode with extensions works pretty great!
Years of coding have so corrupted my brain that inform 7 reads almost like a foreign language. Tads is much more readable to me, because when you’re making a game, you’re in fact writing a highly specialized computer program.
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