creating a text adventure, but with what programming language?

[skurk]

How about making one in AmigaGuide?  Instead of typing, you can use buttons as options.  No need to install anything in case you don't have it, just click and play.

[skurk]

Yeah, that raised an eyebrow here. Perl is a hideous language syntactically (though it is possible to write clean code, it's just that nobody ever does) but you have to give it it's dues; is there anything it can't do with text strings?

Perl is a text processing monster.  I've known Perl for about 13 years now, and it is all I ever use when I need to do more complex text parsing than what's sane in a UNIX shell.