3 ms·

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 th

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. [1]: http://aldebaran.mud.de/ 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 :-)

klibertp 12y ago
> used to extend LPMUDs 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! ;)

klibertp 12y ago

> used to extend LPMUDs 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! ;)