In 1994 there was very little competition in scripting and LPC/Pike/moo and the like cribbed ideas that are still not mainstream or became mainstream much later

In 1994 there was very little competition in scripting and LPC/Pike/moo and the like cribbed ideas that are still not mainstream or became mainstream much later. It's the same year Python got to 1.0 and they didn't get real traction until 2005-2010 sometime. At the time the alternatives were stuff like Tcl and Awk and Perl 5, which were relatively clunky, incompetent or slower. Perl won for web, though Pike had Roxen and could have, and if that had happened we would likely have gotten a more Smalltalk-like Internet than the PHP Internet we got. Pike is fun, it will likely compile just fine on your odd computers if you have any and it has some characteristics that are uncommon like easy hot upgrades for long lived systems and modules as data.