The only one I have much experience with is Inform7. I was pleased with what I saw. Inform7 uses a "natural language" style coding system, where the game inherently understands certain common terms and will interpret sentences that use them and set the game up accordingly.
For example, you could write the following: "The kitchen is a room. It is west of the dining room and south of the hallway. The refrigerator is a closed container in the kitchen. A head of lettuce is in the refrigerator." And the system would automatically create three rooms (kitchen, dining room and hallway), arrange them such that the player could move between them by entering the appropriate commands (north, etc), and populate the kitchen with the appropriate objects (a refrigerator that responds to the "open" command, an item that can be taken from it, etc.)
You do need to learn the particular keywords that Inform7 likes to use, but it's not that difficult and is frequently obvious enough that you can guess the correct terms.
The one downside that I found to Inform7 (and note that this was a much older version and may have been fixed in more recent updates), is that if you want to handle complex mathematical computations (such as character stats), the "natural language" system doesn't lend itself to that very well. You can't just type in the equation, you have to sort of "describe" the equation using English sentences, which is a bit of a headache. But for less math-intensive text adventures Inform7 should do the job just fine.
