This was a great post. I never really thought that much about why I found LPC so good as a starter language, but the "become" method explains it. I found it so natural--I want this to be this, but different, and wow, there it is, cool.
Every time I started making an effort to duplicate the LPMUD experience with whatever, I ended up in some kind of inheritance hell, and this explains that as well.
You've given me quite a lot to think about, and I appreciate it.
(I remember the editing nightmare as well. I had to use computer lab computers, so I did a lot of my work with paper and pencil outside of the lab. That probably did a lot to teach me as well, but even so, the editing part was just awful. The LPMUD I was on got a better editor, something a lot closer to vi, at some point, which made things so much nicer.)
There are workarounds, of course - now that I know what I'm missing, it's perfectly possible to implement it in most anything! Though, why bother, if there are existing systems that already implement it :)
(The other important issue is providing prototypal, dynamic inheritance (like in Self, Io, JS, and ofc LPC). Finally, object persistence - that's something that I didn't consider much until now, but other threads here about MOOs also opened my eyes. Not having to worry about server restarts might be a good thing... I think with these 3 things taken care of you'll get pretty close (maybe even a bit better) to the LPMUD environment.)
Every time I started making an effort to duplicate the LPMUD experience with whatever, I ended up in some kind of inheritance hell, and this explains that as well.
You've given me quite a lot to think about, and I appreciate it.
(I remember the editing nightmare as well. I had to use computer lab computers, so I did a lot of my work with paper and pencil outside of the lab. That probably did a lot to teach me as well, but even so, the editing part was just awful. The LPMUD I was on got a better editor, something a lot closer to vi, at some point, which made things so much nicer.)