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Comment by drbig | Hacker News Reader

I remember coming across Pike about two decades ago (or more), as a young amateur developer... I couldn't understand why anyone would choose Pike.

And today I still can't.

Legacy projects?

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It always seemed like a MUD language project that tried to recycle its efforts by taking on Python, Ruby, etc.

There’s literally no reason to use this language unless you want to make MUD games or are just purely curious about the project.

That's a bit anachronistic. Pike was released in 1994, the same year as Perl 5.0 and Python 1.0. Ruby did not exist yet!

Being an offshoot of an existing MUD language it was quite usable even a young language, comparably good performance and a compelling C embedding. History could very well have been different. The 90s was a really good decade for dynamic languages.

I mean let's be fair: back then MUD nerds were using LambdaMOO's "moo" language and LPmud's "LPC" before things like Python were mainstream or serious, Perl pre-5.0 was terrifying and limited, and Ruby wasn't even on the radar.

So when we went to go do "serious" work we kinda missed them.

Your options in 1991, 92, 93 were earlier perls, shell + awk/sed, or maybe tcl or a lisp/scheme if you were lucky.

The languages inside those MUDs actually were ahead of their time, and their programming model -- in the case of MOO [and its offshoots CoolMUD and ColdMUD] at least -- was more similar to advanced systems like Smalltalk or Self which were hot interesting topics at the time.

Being "confined" to being "game" languages made them not get taken seriously (unlike "JavaScript" which arrived with all sorts of weird warts but had Netscape's brand on it), so the LPC people tried to make it into a "serious" language in the form of Pike, and it's not half bad?

By the late 90s, obviously things had changed. If somebody in a successful "serious" company had adopted Pike/LPC it could easily have had an alternative history where they became commonly used instead of perl5 or php on the early web. (It took Python a decade to get serious headspace there.)

(Gratuitous plug for my LambdaMOO defibrilation: http://github.com/rdaum/moor)

LambdaMOO was ahead of its time in many ways: lists are immutable, but there was a handy splice operator. Verbs could have aliases and wildcards or both, allowing for some interesting namespace-like behavior. Would have been nice if they could have completely decoupled the built in parser before development died off, but it should be a pretty simple task nowadays, and some places like E_MOO managed to soft-code some pretty decent parsers regardless.

LambdaMOO versions from sometime in the mid-90s and up (and offshoots like ToastStunt and also my rewrite, mooR) let you override the builtin parser with $do_command.

And the builtin one I wrote in mooR is built to be pluggable (Rust trait) so should be possible to swap it out.

Ah yes I forgot about $do_command, that’s what we used. For some reason I remember doing it with raw network read commands but that was a different MOO project now that I think about it. Nice to know some people are still doing MUD server dev, it’s a scene I haven’t been back to in a while.

Your name may be familiar.

Never went by my real name on MOOs, but I was on a bunch of them going originally by Phaedrus then Kirlan. I think on E_MOO I was going by Iluvatar. Prisoner #74469 on LambdaMOO, I still remember that. Probably still there, I can't imagine they do any more reaping in this current age when the whole thing can fit comfortably on a raspberry pi.

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