And I read Knuth's book "Literate Programming" in formative years and loved the idea.
But somehow I never connected Inform 7 as generically a live, working modern example of literate programming. That's pretty silly! The language is full of dozens of good examples of worked programs, albeit nearly all written as one kind of text in/text out/parser interaction.
One difference I maybe see is that Knuth writes a book about a program which is built in a very didactic fashion such that every single bit of source code is commented with a detailed explanation of what it does. In real life, though, most Inform games have a bunch of utility code that is not super well commented but is needed to glue things together; and the way that real large Inform games are written means that the program isn't quite as narrative as the example Knuth gives. The program certainly tells a story when interpreted, but the source code of the program itself doesn't tell a story in quite the way that I kind of read Knuth's book as promising.
About half of some of the best IF of 2018 was written in Inform 6 or 7 ( https://ifdb.tads.org/poll?id=mryx4c8bzwym7rvy ), so it's doing fairly well, even if many good authors have been tempted by other options, up to and including roll-your-own.
Separately, I have struggled to find an interpreter on latest OS X that loads all of those 2018 games reliably -- what is the community's preferred Mac interpreter now?
This is a bit random, but I have a cameo appearance in Counterfeit Monkey as my rockstar alter ego 'Nexami Engeo.' Cool to see the game being mentioned on Hacker News
I've read plenty of Inform 7 source code (see e.g. https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey/blob/master/Counter... ).
And I read Knuth's book "Literate Programming" in formative years and loved the idea.
But somehow I never connected Inform 7 as generically a live, working modern example of literate programming. That's pretty silly! The language is full of dozens of good examples of worked programs, albeit nearly all written as one kind of text in/text out/parser interaction.
One difference I maybe see is that Knuth writes a book about a program which is built in a very didactic fashion such that every single bit of source code is commented with a detailed explanation of what it does. In real life, though, most Inform games have a bunch of utility code that is not super well commented but is needed to glue things together; and the way that real large Inform games are written means that the program isn't quite as narrative as the example Knuth gives. The program certainly tells a story when interpreted, but the source code of the program itself doesn't tell a story in quite the way that I kind of read Knuth's book as promising.
About half of some of the best IF of 2018 was written in Inform 6 or 7 ( https://ifdb.tads.org/poll?id=mryx4c8bzwym7rvy ), so it's doing fairly well, even if many good authors have been tempted by other options, up to and including roll-your-own.
Separately, I have struggled to find an interpreter on latest OS X that loads all of those 2018 games reliably -- what is the community's preferred Mac interpreter now?