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David A Cornelson

Chord Writer 1.0 Release

The Go-Live process took a few days, but we got there. Some housekeeping: * This is officially: * Sharpee version 5.0.0 * Chord Language 3.0.0 * Chord Writer (IDE) 1.0.0 * The DMG installer is for Apple silicon (M1-M5) only * The IDE requires Node 18+ and the

Introducing: Chord Writer

It has been exactly 27 days since I began designing and building the Chord language. In that time Sharpee (now referred to as the platform) has been scrubbed of many of its early cruft because creating Chord repeatedly exposed those seams. There were embarrassing event handlers that never acted and

Singular Transcripts Out, Branches In

A follow-up to the previous post about seeding and RNG madness. That work is done, but then I needed to figure out how an author creates tests in the IDE. My first reach was to copy Inform 7, but that doesn't really align with how I see

Game Platforms, RNG, and Testing

So you want to build a game building platform. You're cruising along and your test games have the usual randomness that adds a little spice to your games, usually combat scenarios. Then other things get a random kick. Then another. You ignore the orthogonal nature of randomness because

Sharpee v4 and Chord v2

The whole concept of versioning software that is built using GenAI is that things change fast and in large ways. In the before times, large feature additions would be considered, designed, and took a long time to deliver. With the models progression from Opus 4 in December of '25

Chord Version 1

Over the last two weeks I have aligned Sharpee with a new parser-IF modeling language called Chord. This effort was not to adhere to one side or the other. It was a true alignment where both sides were required to maintain their "way", be elegant, and in

Chord Design and Development

After the first pass at designing Chord, I followed the same step as I did with Sharpee. I worked with Claude to build first an Author's Guide, then documentation for the Standard Library. The first document used Family Zoo as its spine and although we found a few

Sharpee: Chord

Now that version 2.2 of Sharpee is shipped with the website and developer manual updated, I took a swing at developing a more author friendly syntax that compiles to Sharpee. I'm calling it Chord. It's currently implemented in a branch and working with Cloak of

Sharpee 2.1

Phrase Algebra Fully Implemented * Sharpee 2.x replaces the entire text-rendering system. Text is no longer a string with embedded formatters; it's a tree of typed Phrase values that defer realization, rendered by one per-locale Assembler at the end of the turn. * The old formatter chain

Phrase Algebra and Sharpee 2.0

There is still one glaring weakness in Sharpee directly related to separating logic from text emission. Sharpee is intentionally a developer-first/author-second platform and I've leaned into that design. I often use the words, "The Sharpee Way," when talking to Claude. As an exercise