Pike is one of my favorite languages, but I've hardly used it. It's dear to me to me for purely sentimental reasons. As the article briefly mentions, Pike is the spiritual successor to LPC, a pretty unique language from the late 80s/early 90s used to extend LPMUDs and write areas, items, mobs, etc. I'd dabbled in programming before, but LPC was the first language I used to write real code shipped to production on a MUD called Aldebaran [1], with a user base in the hundreds (felt huge at the time :-)), circa 2001.<p>I remember very quickly losing interest in playing Aldebaran when I saw how the so-called "wizards" (programmers) could manipulate the world around them with code [2]. I decided almost right away that I would play exactly enough to fulfill the bare minimum requirements to apply to become a wizard and harass the administrators until they let me have a trial run. A few weeks later, the admins relented, and I haven't stopped coding since.<p>[1]: <a href="http://aldebaran.mud.de/" rel="nofollow">http://aldebaran.mud.de/</a><p>[2]: Looking back, Aldebaran to the wizard was an almost Emacs-like interactive environment. You could create and manipulate items on the fly by cloning a blueprint and, using a special wizard's staff, evaluate code directly on that item without changing any files. And like Emacs, the text editor it came with (an ed clone) was terrible :-)
For a very short while it looked like Pike could take a seat among the othe "P" languages (Perl, Python, PHP), but that was <i>quite</i> a while ago. And mostly because it was bundled with the Roxen web server. IIRC its claim to fame was easy headline font->image rendering…<p>fugaces labuntur anni, indeed.
Oh gosh, I remember checking out Pike a longgg time a go! Totally forgot about it since them.<p>Checking it again today makes me realize how neat it is, the union types (now in typescript as well) are awesome.