From the point of view of language design and implementation, scripting languages for interactive fiction or visual novels -- such as Harlowe, SugarCube, or Ren'Py -- are interesting in their pragmatism. They hide complexity from the programmer and try to put focus on generating story content. While paradigms such as Model-View-Controller or Model-View-ViewModel tend to crop up in general-purpose programming languages to help manage front-end complexity, these languages mix code and content much like how PHP or HTML+JavaScript was used a decade ago. But by keeping syntax simple, the MVC or MVVM separation of concerns is not necessary.

To keep things intuitive for the non-programmer, they make some interesting decisions about readers, interaction models, procedure definitions, and scoping. These decisions are examined and contrasted with Scheme's standard programming paradigm.