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Simplicity of IRC

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#21

Post by lambdaba »

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…

100%, the fact that you can literally pipe some data in a command-line IRC client is 1000x more conducive to such tweaking than using custom APIs/SDKs

long live the Unix model!

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#22

Post by einpoklum »

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…

> ... difficult to write simple things...

and

> Once upon a time, one could download visual studio,

don't seem to agree very well. Visual Studio is a behemoth and usually results in stuff that's non-standard, non-portable and with lots of dependencies.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#23

Post by lambdaba »

trixie_ wrote: post #16
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.

There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to Discord/Slack, but I would prefer working with multiple simple tools than a monolith, different tools for different uses, and glue them together when needed (it doesn't need to be complicated, and if it is, than some additional effort is justified)

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#25

Post by nine_k »

I'd say it's in the same general box as the simplicity of 8-bit computers booting into Basic interpreter, and the simplicity of Legos.

It's wonderful when you can have your toys in a sandbox where you use and develop them mostly for fun, and for scratching your own itch, away from well-moneyed interests. No need to carefully identify participants. No need to encrypt, or otherwise complicate the implementation. No need to efficiently serve millions of users. No need to add bling to attract more of those who barely cares. (The latter is not the case with Legos lately, though.)

This is why I think that a lot of innovation starts in the fringe, and looks like mostly useless toys, until one of these toys proves very useful for "real world" needs.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#26

Post by hiptobecubic »

trixie_ wrote: post #16
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.

It did happen, though. Just not in the same way. When it gets to the point where notifications are too spammy, it's very very easy to direct things to use a different channel and it works at huge scale. Anyone who uses IRC more than casually via some web portal is capable of being in more than one channel at a time. Google SRE still uses IRC internally specifically because it always just works and does what people need it to do.

One of the downfalls of IRC is the notion that everything should happen in the chat. There's no reason you can't have a pastebin and a file server and screenshot sharing service, most of which don't matter anymore after 5 minutes anyway. It works really well and in fact, we kept using them after switching to fat chat because it was a better experience. There are reasons to want a fat chat client (primarily mobile, imo), but having used both for many years, the featureful chat client ends up being worse than just sharing links most of the time.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#27

Post by lambdaba »

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…

Bash is the Basic of our era, the fact that it's so easy to do simple things explains why people are so often ready to use it despite its perceived and real shortcomings. Hopefully one of the new shells gains enough popularity to "flip" usage and give us a renaissance of powerful scripting interfaces.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#28

Post by lambdaba »

tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Speaking of ‘simplicity’, this blog has a fantastic design. The CSS is only ~30 lines and is largely just applying spacing/padding. No JS, no custom font, etc. https://susam.net/css/main.css

It's pretty nice indeed. I like the use of keywords for sizes "thin", "large", and the shorthand hex for colors, and the fact that there's zero boilerplate and only styling what's actually used.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#30

Post by epalm »

As an aside, can I just say how refreshing this website is? It's 100% content, just text. Now view the html source, and be amazed. I daresay the author actually wrote the html by hand. I suppose it could be a very conservative and conscientious site generator that even respects line length, but I'd be surprised. Short css file for minimal style tweaks, and readable markup. Fitting that the article is about simplicity. When I first learned html (late 90s) this is what it looked like. Very nice.
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