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Simplicity of IRC

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#71

Post by cout »

lambdaba wrote: post #27
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.

Why bash over the browser javascript console? It is everywhere and allows interactive editing of a "program", much like the BASIC interpreters of old.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#72

Post by fivea »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #51
Iv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on windows This is the mistake. Linux and, I believe, OSX come with several tools pre-installed including python.

Windows comes with PowerShell, which is a pretty fully featured programming language that can interface directly with the .NET ecosystem.

> Windows comes with PowerShell (...)

It might be just me, but PowerShell feels outright developer-hostile even when compared to Bash. Perhaps it's their approach to rely primarily on .NET stuff which makes things so arcane, but when given the option it's far simpler and better to go with, say, python than PowerShell.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#73

Post by flatiron »

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.

Same with slack webhooks. I make custom software and everyone wants slack webhooks and they are pretty easy to implement and people love them.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#74

Post by Blikkentrekker »

The simplicity also comes with problems, such as nickname registration in practice being implemented with bots that have administrative rights, which can lead to social engineering exploits and poor standardization of their interfaces, or the fact that the protocol does not seem to support sending an encoding so it relies on the gentleman's agreement that everyone use UTF-8, which works until that one user using latin-1 enters and starts sending characters that appear strange to everyone else.

It could be a little bit more complex in my opinion. Perhaps it is time for servers to start supporting an i.r.c. 2.0 protocol but otherwise allow 1.0 and 2.0 users to still communicate with each other to facilitate the migration.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#75

Post by ripe »

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…

Yes! I learned BASIC on the BBC Micro. You turned it on, and you got a BASIC interpreter. It was the most painless, most fun experience. Graphics, sound,, etc., were all available by reading the User Guide.

I couldn't have afforded buying one, but my university had half a dozen.

I wish kids today could get that.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#76

Post by lloeki »

enumjorge wrote: post #52
Iv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on windows This is the mistake. Linux and, I believe, OSX come with several tools pre-installed including python.

A tool shouldn’t need to come preinstalled with the OS in order to be useable. And “switch to a different OS” is not a good solution especially for cases where you don’t control the OS you run. For a long time MacOS came with only Python 2.x installed. I looked up what the latest version of MacOS comes with and came across an Apple support forum post with several responses posting conflicting answers [0]. One person…

> Having to install a heavyweight IDE

xcode-select --install pulls in the CLT, which is a fairly reasonably sized download given that it includes various essential dev tools including python3 but without Xcode.

This is hinted at by attempting to run python3 before any install, which calls a stub prompting you to do just that.

py2/ruby/perl/etc... are part of the base OS for backwards compatibility/expectations (because they were so before Xcode/CLT were even a thing) but have been marked as due for removal from base for something like half a decade. My bet is that at some point they will move to the CLT (or some other optional download) as well.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#77

Post by lambdaba »

cout wrote: post #71
lambdaba wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why bash over the browser javascript console? It is everywhere and allows interactive editing of a "program", much like the BASIC interpreters of old.

Yeah but how do I pipe to other programs? How do I schedule something and integrate it with my filesystem? Also the syntax is complicated (don't underestimate this, for many of us trouble parsing syntax is a distant memory). Also easy interop between many programming languages.

Maybe when the browser fully swallows the OS but I hope it won't be JavaScript or it would have morphed into something else.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#78

Post by alkonaut »

lambdaba wrote: post #29

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. ; basically. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy )

While some of those guidelines offer some value still, end-user programs dealing with text just aren’t ever going to be a thing.

People expect to be able to paste a photo or screenshot just as easily as they post a sentence. Requiring a second app to do it (posting a link) isn’t nearly as good a UX as simply pasting in pictures.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#79

Post by LinuxBender »

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…

There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3]

[1] - https://convos.chat/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/

[3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#80

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

fivea wrote: post #72
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows comes with PowerShell, which is a pretty fully featured programming language that can interface directly with the .NET ecosystem.

> Windows comes with PowerShell (...) It might be just me, but PowerShell feels outright developer-hostile even when compared to Bash. Perhaps it's their approach to rely primarily on .NET stuff which makes things so arcane, but when given the option it's far simpler and better to go with, say, python than PowerShell.

I couldn't disagree more, I think bash is a horrifically bad programming language. Honestly I'm incredibly surprised anyone could compare PowerShell and bash and think that PowerShell is the arcane one.
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