Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Simplicity of IRC

susam.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 250 posts

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#11

Post by alufers »

c0l0 wrote: post #10

A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of…

I once needed to create a bot that sent notification and I just used the webhook feature in a Team channel. Not defending Teams though, it is a horrendous piece of software.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#12

Post by FemmeAndroid »

iqanq wrote: post #4

>I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how that has fostered creativity in the lives of young programmers growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s. For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be our first non-trivial hobby programming project that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users. W…

Is this true? It’s not my experience. My first meaningful programs were raw socket IRC clients as a teenager explicitly because they were simpler to figure out than using things like egg drop.

That isn’t to say that most fully featured tools were written from scratch — I can’t speak to that one way or another. But I know a lot of people who were learning about internet protocols by using telnet to interact directly with IRC servers then transferring that knowledge into a socket-level reimplementation of the protocol.

RFC1459 certainly proved to me that RFCs can be simple and worth reading. And the whole experience taught me early that a simple enough, well documented protocol could be easier to use than a wrapper library in a foreign language. I certainly use a lot of libraries these days, but those lessons have served me extremely well.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#13

Post by c0l0 »

alufers wrote: post #11
c0l0 wrote: post #10

A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of…

I once needed to create a bot that sent notification and I just used the webhook feature in a Team channel. Not defending Teams though, it is a horrendous piece of software.

Maybe that wasn't possible/enabled for our particular deployment (that was in the IT dept. of a big European bank), as we had what I've been told was a strange bastardization of O365 and other MSFT services - a mix of on-prem and cloud services unlikely to be found elsewhere.

At any rate, for the IRC server at the shop I was at previously, I had "webhook" support/a http(s)->irc gateway implemented on my own in much less than an hour via CGI ;)

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#14

Post by [deleted] »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #12
iqanq wrote: post #4

>I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how that has fostered creativity in the lives of young programmers growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s. For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be our first non-trivial hobby programming project that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users. W…

Is this true? It’s not my experience. My first meaningful programs were raw socket IRC clients as a teenager explicitly because they were simpler to figure out than using things like egg drop. That isn’t to say that most fully featured tools were written from scratch — I can’t speak to that one way or another. But I know a lot of people who were learning about internet protocols by using telnet to interact directly w…

[deleted]

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#15

Post by prox »

hoyd wrote: post #2

Nice article, thanks :-) I grew up with IRC and realize that it isn't the same any longer. It isn't the place where everyone is, which some social networks seem to be today. The local communities on IRC, a channel for a town used to be the place to be and meet others.

I think Discord took over the role of IRC. It has a lot of same functions and terminology.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#16

Post by trixie_ »

c0l0 wrote: post #10

A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of…

The integrations are a neat trick, but often end up spamming a channel where people are trying to communicate.

Teams seamlessly works across platforms, and mobile with video chat, files, outlook integration, and screen sharing. Maybe IRC could of been that, but it never happened.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#17

Post by 323 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

Rose tinted glasses?

Visual Basic (classic) that you mentioned, discontinued in 2008, was not free, unless you pirated it.

> ‘just drawing things’

For that you have much more amazing things today, like Shadertoy, or various artistic programming languages like Processing, ...

Programming is easier than ever, computers are extremely cheap, software is free, documentation on the internet is free, YouTube is full of tutorials, there are literally no obstacles if you want to do it.

Back in my day I had to pay for computers, for programming software, for books, Internet cost a fortune, ...

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#18

Post by yetihehe »

In the beginning was the command line. Then work of bright people of Xerox PARC was used to hide from users the reality that underneath their beloved GUI, computers are just passing around strings of text. Now we yearn for a time when you were just one INT and several MOV away from putting a pixel on a screen, instead of downloading multi-GB IDE to fiddle for a weekend before you can show a simple window.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#19

Post by boondaburrah »

323 wrote: post #17
dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

Rose tinted glasses? Visual Basic (classic) that you mentioned, discontinued in 2008, was not free, unless you pirated it. > ‘just drawing things’ For that you have much more amazing things today, like Shadertoy, or various artistic programming languages like Processing, ... Programming is easier than ever, computers are extremely cheap, software is free, documentation on the internet is free, YouTube is full of tuto…

I believe there were some visual basic books you could get that would have a CD-ROM with a limited version in the back, but I may not be remembering correctly. Of course, you could also check those books out of the library and online activation wasn't really a thing then, so that's how I remember starting.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#20

Post by magpi3 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #6

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer a…

> Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button

The world that lived behind that experience - COM & Active X Controls - was extremely complex. If you needed to build a new active x control for your app, god save you.

It's been said a million times, but in programming there is always complexity. Sometimes it is just well hidden.

Post reply on HN