I owe my career in programming to a MUD

I'm the same, but from the other side. I learned to code clients/bots that would play the MUD. I had a fantastic fighting script, that basically fought optimally, one that used two characters at the same time to solve some complicated maze, and I even wrote a headless bot runner that was compatible with the files of the MUD client I used. It was all great fun, and I also owe my extensive regex experience to it.

Same here , I got addicted to a mud called realms of despair , smaug codebase, a derivative of Dikumud, I then ended up helping run a pretty popular server on the same codebase with some friends I met on the server. Bought a "learn c++ for dummies book" (even though it was programmed in c) and started modifying the server and the rest was history ;) I guess I was 14 at the time and I haven't stopped programming since. Gaming is definitely the gateway drug to programming and text based games are in some ways the most interesting form for learning due to not having to worry about graphics and immediately seeing results like you mention. I've often thought about implementing "Claude plays" some open source mud. Seems like a much more pure form of experiment since it's all text.

> tonnes of really bad code other clueless newbies like myself had written... When I first looked at MUD code, I had not yet learned to code. I thought that the folks who wrote the code must be so smart, and felt intimidated by it. Fast forward a few decades, and I recently looked at MUD code again. I spent a week porting ROT 1.4 to a node server, mostly just as a personal coding exercise, and found myself realizing just how bad that code actually was. Yet we need to be fair. As you said, it was written by newbies, mostly students. It was written before modern tech stacks, before modern practices. And despite all the critique we could throw at it... it worked. It stills works. It was shared, copied, modified, and kept on working for many people, over many years. And it definitely inspired people to learn and try new things.

I suspect that in another 10 years or so - or probably today already - we'll see similar stories coming from people who started with e.g. Minecraft or Roblox, which are in a sense just as much programming, user generated content games as MUDs are. Maybe a bit more visual.

When I was starting out with Python, I found a library that implemented a Python version of MOO. It was brilliantly named "POO" (although in later versions it lamentably changed its name to "MOOP"). The cool thing about it was the in-world coding language was also Python, so when you code for custom rooms and objects, etc., it was all Python. I had a lot of fun with it.