My first real experience with learning to program anything (other than tinkering with some BASIC as a young kid) was scripting objects in a MUD. This was, I gue

My first real experience with learning to program anything (other than tinkering with some BASIC as a young kid) was scripting objects in a MUD. This was, I guess, the mod-90's, text-only equivalent of SL. You could even attach HTML to them and view said HTML by tacking the object ID onto the MUD's web site address. That's how I built my first web site; editing some markup attached to an object on a MUD server, over a telnet connection. My next big step up was the mIRC scripting language. You could make GUIs!