dsandler.org/wp

Man, do I really need to learn another
high-level programming language? (Can I resist?)

Then again, pike has some neat features. Firstly, it’s full of fancy
first-class values for functions, objects, classes, and even programs. (In
fact, it seems clear that the author has had his share of Lisp and Scheme; as
evidence I note that the predicate functions all end in “p”  a Lisp
throwback.) It’s full of fun language features:

Another way of compiling files to program is to use the cast operator.
Casting a string to the type program calls a function in the master object
which will compile the program in question for you. The master also keeps the
program in a cache, so if you later need the same program again it will not be
re-compiled.

It
seems that Pike was originally started as a replacement for LPC, the C-like language used to
program LPmuds. The LPC-replacement started seeing heavy use unrelated to the
MUD (and also unrelated to webservers, which was the other original problem
domain) and so Pike was born to further this environment as a flexible
programming language.