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.
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.
[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 :-)
It would be probably better to say it was used to implement LPMUDs (still is, BTW). Driver without a mudlib - written in LPC - was not very useful at all.
> special wizard's staff
A driver of the MUD I worked on had a special set of objects used for introspection/reflection: you could inspect object state, set it's attributes and evaluate arbitrary code "inside the object". These were invoked as normal global commands IIRC. Now I wish we had it coded as a wizard's staff, too :)
> almost Emacs-like interactive environment
Also similar to image-based Smalltalk or Lisp. It's a pity that it wasn't used to build a Smalltalk-like graphic environment, but in its text form this environment was awesome, too.
> the text editor it came with (an ed clone) was terrible
OMG, please don't remind me of this. I had to learn ed, because on our MUD we had no FTP access for some time and it was a tragic experience. I was only able to live with it thanks to MUSHClient, which did a great job at handling large amount of text and I mostly just copied the code to notepad and then pasted it back after modification. But, on the flip side, I could never understand why people don't like Vi - it's so much better than ed! ;)
For a very short while it looked like Pike could take a seat among the othe "P" languages (Perl, Python, PHP), but that was quite 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…
How exactly? Pike is no closer to JavaScript than to Python for example. Out of languages I know I think only Boo looks a bit similar - Pike is it's own thing, it's design is based on earlier LPC language, which IIRC existed years before JavaScript, Python, Ruby and PHP.
BTW, LPC was fun to work with, too: prototype-based OO, mix of static and dynamic typing similar to that of Dylan, shadowing (a bit like mixins, but not quite) and inherent liveness of the system (as proposed by Self and Smalltalk, just using text UI instead of GUI) made it very exciting language for the me back then: a fledgeling C++ programmer. IIRC it was byte-compiled, too. LPC suffered because it was too closely tied to the idea of a MUD (there were other commercial applications of it, though) and I think Pike tried to fix this. But in the process Pike made the MUD-creators community less interested in it, which drastically reduced its initial user base.
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.
[1]: http://aldebaran.mud.de/
[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 :-)