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Simplicity of IRC

susam.net

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#41

Post by corobo »

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…

Admittedly my first bot was indeed in mIRCScript and its abstractions but it wasn't long before I had a !spawn command that was a function that connected sub-bots directly to IRC as a protocol because why not I guess

Also wrote a script that sent email directly for tinkering purposes, later used that protocol knowledge to get my first tech job haha "how does email work?" "how in-depth do you want?"

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#42

Post by 323 »

layer8 wrote: post #36
323 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

However, today there is no VB-like experience for modern development regardless how much you’d be willing to pay for it.

Delphi still exists:

> Build Native Apps 5x Faster With One Codebase. For Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

And it's free if you don't make a lot of money of what you build.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#43

Post by lambdaba »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #32
lambdaba wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, but I hate this: a:link, a:visited { color: #00e; } Why do this?

Oh, yeah, that should be illegal.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#44

Post by Zababa »

epalm wrote: post #30

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…

It seems like the CSS used is shared under the MIT license by the author here: https://github.com/susam/spcss.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#45

Post by lambdaba »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #31
lambdaba wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

If you look at these communities, there is basically only one feature of Discord/Slack that they use that IRC does not easily provide and that's ephemeral/mobile. If I go offline for an hour in IRC, I lose a bunch of messages unless I've done some backflips to set up some kind of archiving/replay in a separate failure domain (e.g. znc running on gcp). With chat services, the service is essentially znc for free. The r…

I think the latter argument is 90% of the reason. Too bad this new generation doesn't have an opensource base of software to work with, or rather somehow didn't get acculturated to the existing one. Actually, that's probably because there were those few "killer features" such as offline messages that the existing systems didn't have.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#46

Post by apples_oranges »

stavros wrote: post #3

Same with SMTP and POP, I would routinely send or get email via telnet when I wanted to debug or delete some messages. They're all very simple protocols.

In my experience, email protocols are anything but simple as soon as some security or authentication comes into play.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#47

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

layer8 wrote: post #36
323 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

However, today there is no VB-like experience for modern development regardless how much you’d be willing to pay for it.

I remember Delphi being pretty close back in the day, and it's still around[0] if you're willing to pay for it. Lazarus[1] is another option.

Apart from the underlying language, the experience is pretty close.

[0] https://www.embarcadero.com/

[1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#48

Post by mnd999 »

prox wrote: post #15
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.

Discord is internet relay meme.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#49

Post by anthk »

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…

With ii you can write a bot today with any language reading and writting to files. Even with sh.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#50

Post by michaelt »

lambdaba wrote: post #21
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!

Doesn't that mean you get a channel join/leave for almost every message?
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