I was actually going to jump into that thread and talk about Dialog! I made a game with it recently. I have no TADS experience in programming, so I’ll just assume it behaves similar to a standard programming language like C or C++. I do have some experience in playing.
Dialog’s biggest benefit compared to TADS is its great integration with online play. Dialog can basically do multimedia and links really well online with little work. Offline, it doesn’t have any advantages over HTML TADS.
Another benefit of Dialog is that all of it is based on predicates, so that once you understand predicates you can do just about everything in the same way. There’s not really a need to memorize most stuff, you can just wing things.
The biggest drawback to Dialog is its lack of documentation and example texts. Few people can help you with Dialog either. Also, I personally really struggled to use basic math in Dialog like having a global number variable that went up and down. Local variables are a lot easier.
Conversation-wise, TADS has some great built-in tools for asking and telling topics. Dialog has a very sophisticated choice-based conversation system for making ‘nodes’ and connecting them and changing them.
I wrote about my experience using Dialog here: