Pike features garbage collection, advanced data types, and first-class anonymous functions, with support for many programming paradigms, including object-oriented, functional and imperative programming.

Pike is free software, released under the GPL, LGPL and MPL licenses.

Programmers at Lysator in Linköping, Sweden, most notably Fredrik Hübinette and Per Hedbor,[1] separated the language and virtual machine from the rest of the MUD driver, and used it as a rapid prototyping language for various applications, calling it LPC4.

In 1996, μLPC was renamed to Pike in order to provide a more commercially viable name.

In 2002, the programming environment laboratory at Linköping University took over maintenance of Pike from Roxen.