I think it's important to point out that MUDs were probably the first complicated interactive synchronous "Internet applications", even though they were (primarily) textually driven and not "serious" (they were to us). So things like Pike (née-LPC) & moo were on the forefront here on how to author those kind of dynamic systems.

Early web sites, gopher, etc were just request/response mostly static content (sometimes with a dash of a database). They weren't synchronous or "live" in any real way. Things like IRC were synchronous but did not do programmable/dynamic content.

I cut my teeth on moo, and was bored & annoyed to tears writing cgi scripts in Python & Perl and the web didn't catch up to produce really interactive stuff until well over 10 years later ("web 2.0")

You realize that you're on a site that is mainly for programmers, right? Programmers are often interested in languages, for the same reason that woodworkers are often interested in wood - even a kind of wood that they may never use.

In 1994 there was very little competition in scripting and LPC/Pike/moo and the like cribbed ideas that are still not mainstream or became mainstream much later. It's the same year Python got to 1.0 and they didn't get real traction until 2005-2010 sometime.

At the time the alternatives were stuff like Tcl and Awk and Perl 5, which were relatively clunky, incompetent or slower. Perl won for web, though Pike had Roxen and could have, and if that had happened we would likely have gotten a more Smalltalk-like Internet than the PHP Internet we got.

Pike is fun, it will likely compile just fine on your odd computers if you have any and it has some characteristics that are uncommon like easy hot upgrades for long lived systems and modules as data.