"I mention Knuth because, of all the Old Masters of computer science, he is the one most interested in the relationship between computer programs and texts. Could we even suggest that a program is a text? It is, after all, a written expression of creativity. Certainly, when running, a computer game can be an artistic experience in the same way that a film, or a play can. But my concern here is not whether the program is art when it runs. I’m talking about whether its source code is a text. We could go down a bit of a rabbit-hole here about playful literary theories. Umberto Eco once reviewed a new Italian banknote as a work of art, describing it as a numbered, limited edition of engravings. But let’s concede that a functional document like a shopping list or a spreadsheet of student names is not a literary text. On the other hand, a recipe by a literary cook like Elizabeth David might be art, even though it also has function. Perhaps the relevant question is: can we experience a program as a text? Can we, in the fullest sense of the word, read it?

A cynical answer might be that if program source codes are texts, why can’t you buy them in a bookshop?" Graham Nelson on a potted history of Inform, and then its future. The second half may be less interesting to you, but the first half is a fantastic piece of writing on literate programming, source-code-as-art, and the nature of languages. I loved this.

Write the documentation for your tool to define the interface. Very nifty, and has polyglot parsers.

"a class factory and dsl for generating command line programs real quick" I like the look of this: solves lots of things I've always made clunky workarounds for.

Great set of pictures from Evo 2013; I really, really ought to go sometime.

"The story description is "Giving objects in a story world symbolic weight has often been done by hand, but rarely procedurally. Here's one method for doing so."." This is stunning.

"The book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but also doesn't treat I7 like a regular programming language: loops, for instance, are barely mentioned. In fact, Thinking in Inform 7 might have been a good title." This sounds great.

Brilliant.

Nice, if somewhat DVD-extra-y, video on the RDR soundtrack. The most interesting footage is of the recording sessions and the musicians. It's a shame we're still at layering everything at same tempo/key, when it comes to interactive scores; I miss iMuse. But otherwise: great stuff.