Although the core library is not updated anymore, I find TADS 3 to be the superior language for offline interactive fiction. It's the most technical language by far, but that's why it's also the most feature rich (and for someone with a programming background, probably also the most intuitive). I'm still regularly amazed at what's baked into the standard library, that would be an absolute pain, or even outright impossible to do with other authoring systems.

http://www.tads.org/