Alan code is natural and easy to write. It's close to natural language so it's also easy to read and interpret, making your authoring a breeze.
There are interpreters for many platforms, most supporting graphics, making it easy to supplement your story with tantalizing imagery.
Alan comes with an Integrated Development Environment sporting a modern environment and tools to take your edit, compile, play cycle to seconds.
Alan is a tool for creating works of Interactive Fiction, a.k.a text adventures. It is easy to use. It's focus has always been on the authoring aspects.
Alan consists of a programming language and a set of tools to support working in that language to create games. The tools include a compiler, various flavours of runners/interpreters, a completely integrated development environment, a map generator and more.
Alan is in the final stages in moving towards version 3, and has entered beta state. This means that no incompatible changes are planned before release. So unless severe bugs or problems are found during the beta phase, games produced with a beta version should work even after release. So Alan V3 is now ready for supported production work.
Alan v2 is very obsolete. It might work for you but I strongly advice you to migrate to Alan v3. If you are starting from scratch with a new game, there is no choice.
If you want to carry some work with you there is a guide for conversion and a tool (in the SDK:s) to do the bulk work.
Here are some material on Alan v2
Again, Alan v2 is very obsolete! Thank you for upgrading!