[ydant]

This is a fun blast from the past. One of my first real programming experiences was working as a (the) programmer on a MUD and I remember learning about this technique somewhere (I think just reading about how forking worked) and then figuring out how to implement it on our MUD.

It felt absolutely magical to be able to hot deploy changes without kicking everyone off of the server - but felt even more magical to have gotten it to work.

The MUD community was a fun early introduction to open source. People (many of them probably "kids" like I was at the time) sharing various patches and features. It felt so cool to release something and have other people use it and provide feedback. Like the author says - at some point the MUD itself became a lot less interesting than the programming.

[jonmarkgo]

MUDs were how I really learned to code (in C) and how I fell in love with programming and online communities, almost 25 years ago now.

[ZeWaka]

> The MUD community was a fun early introduction to open source.

They still are these days. There's plenty around, and there's even more MUD-likes (GUI) that are open-source and played/developed by hundreds & thousands.

[dominicrose]

I was using Ruby for hot reload, but then of course it was after the first MUDs. When everything is a function, you can just reload them. Doing it in Typescript (for fun) was also possible but quite challenging.