I fooled around with Inform for a while a few years back, it's like writing an adventure game within the natural language interpreter itself, complete with all the interpreter's quirks and deficiencies. Battling against this was a fun challenge and a game in itself. Some people are productive in it, somehow.
That echoes my experience as well. I think it may be easier for those who have not had formal training in a traditional programming language, who happen to also be especially detail-oriented writers.