Pike Programming Language

We built the Opera Mini server infrastructure based on Pike, starting back in 2004-2005 with a team that initially mostly came from the Roxen/Spinner days (a separate company). I started working there in 97, and I was kinda late to the party - it started out in 93/94. I still miss working with this language. It just makes so much sense to me. The way I think of it is as a quite a lot more performant version of Python…

Lots of people questioning what Pike brings to the table. Be aware that Pike has been around for over 31 years[1]. It's kind of dead now and a lot of people have moved over to Lua[2] (which is over 32 years old!). So long ago, that it took me a minute to recall having programmed a lot of CGI code with it, back in the Roxen web server[3] days. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language)#Hi... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxen_(web_server)

I remember learning about Pike nearly twenty years ago. It made some decisions that seemed odd then but which seem rather modern in retrospect. First of all, it was a scripting language that had typed arguments. And second of all it allowed multiple types as arguments and returns -- for example you could define a function int|float sq(int|float x) {return x*x;} that would do the right thing for ints and floats but still error out on strings.