Inform is a programming language for creating interactive fiction (opens in new tab)

Indeed. Adventure games were the most sophisticated games around. Companies like Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls ruled the roost. Teenagers like myself aspired to one day work there, which for me was a major reason to go and study AI (which was mostly parsers and tree walks at the time).

And then along came iD software. One day I walked into the shared computer facility of my university and everybody was playing Castle Wolfenstein and I remember thinking: o shit...

Fortunately AI did not turn out to be such a bad choice after all.

Luckily, the target audience of Inform are people who like adventure games (people who are used to playing "guess the verb").

On the other hand, the results can be remarkably readable, and in a fascinating way. As an example, here's a small game I wrote using it:

https://dwheeler.com/accuse/source.html

I don't know if there's a lesson to be learned, but as someone who's learned many programming languages, Inform 7 is intriguingly different.

Not sure if it's because I said "very short", but it basically locked me into a cabin without letting me go anywhere. It did describe a fair amount of objects inside the cabin though.

The source code for MINI weighs in at 4.6 K, saved in the tokenised form used by BBC BASIC.

In comparison, the Inform 7 source is around 3.3K in size. But that isn’t executable - it can be run in Inform 7, or it can be compiled into a “story file”, of which Inform 7 supports two formats. In the older, more portable, Z-Code format, I got a blorb (package) of 406 K; in the newer, more sophisticated Glulx format, I got a blorb of 602 K.

And to actually play the story file, you need an interpreter - for example, Windows Glulxe, an interpreter for (as the observant reader might guess) playing Glulx story files under Windows, is a further 275 K. Inform 7 can also produce a story file and bundled Javascript interpreter for a version playable in a web browser: for MINI, this bundle weighs in at 1.1 MB.

Why would you choose why over another? It's like general programming languages, the design makes trade-offs between expressiveness and simplicity, makes one approach more canonical than the others (e.g. in state management, choice between focusing on transition or locus, etc).

Most companies producing commercial IF have in-house tooling focused on their "house style", e.g. ChoiceScript for CYOA with "chunky" dynamic content versus StoryNexus (or whatever its modern iteration is) for a more fine-grained RPG-like approach.

How (or whether) you simulate time passing also differentiates many engines.