I wrote my first game in Inform 6 (almost 20 years ago now!). I had very little programming experience. It’s true you don’t get a friendly IDE like the one that runs Inform 7, but once you set it up, that’s not too big a deal – and there are some subtle advantages in using I6 rather than I7. For instance, you can use multiple source code files in a project.
One downside is that there’s no World tab to show you things like an object list or your map. You have to keep track of all that stuff yourself.
There are good free text editors for all platforms. For Windows, I can recommend Notepad++.