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Simplicity of IRC

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#81

Post by LinuxBender »

cout wrote: post #64
DogLover_ wrote: post #59

I used IRC for gaming around 2004 - fond memories! I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.

An IRC network can have thousands of channels; a discord server typically has dozens. Think of a discord channel as a permanent thread or a topic and a discord server like an irc channel. I find discord's model more manageable than irc for a large number of users; irc channels become a mess around 50-100 active users. Dividing the conversations into topics helps a lot. (I have been using irc since around 1994 and am…

I would imagine one could tweak the web frontends like Convos or TheLounge to make IRC look and behave like Discord at least in terms of text chat and channel/user visibility. I theorize that's what they are doing behind the scenes.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#82

Post by _8j50 »

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…

Modern apps have modern requirements like better security. Better UX, quality and security beats dev convenience every time.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#83

Post by ferdowsi »

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!

I don't see why you couldn't do the same in a Slack command-line program as well? Not hard to find simple examples of that.

https://github.com/csabapalfi/slackcat

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#84

Post by lambdaba »

alkonaut wrote: post #78
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.

Well, in practice you can have binary input, as many programs do, but human-readable free-form text is the simplest interface there is.

We just need more modern terminals that can handle that.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#85

Post by arbaal »

c0l0 wrote: post #13
alufers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Isn't your comment then very specifiy for that installation of yours? When you use MS Teams in a "normal" O365 environment, then every feature you described for IRC is possible with weebhooks and the cards API. Simple CURL based integration.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#86

Post by rahen »

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.

Have you tried Lazarus?

https://www.lazarus-ide.org

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#87

Post by jokoon »

I love IRC, unfortunately it doesn't work properly with smartphones because they have a "loose" connectivity (4G towers data etc). I'm not sure IRC apps can deal with this already. It would be nice to have some update to the IRC RFC.

If it was well supported for smartphones, I'm still wondering if it would cause some bandwidth costs to servers.

EDIT: I know about bouncers, but I would prefer to do without.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#88

Post by lloeki »

mcfedr wrote: post #61
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've not used teams, but both slack and Google chat make it very easy to post messages, a simple curl call has often been more than enough in lots of scripts

That is, unless the enterprise has policies to abide by disallowing API calls, in which case you're stuck with the official client and vetted integrations.

Same for mobile, the advantage vanishes once enterprise requires your (usually personal) phone to be surrendered to corp IT via MDM (which I sure as hell won't do).

The whole value proposition of Slack and Teams for their customers is control.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#89

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

alkonaut wrote: post #78
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.

Then have the chat client automatically upload to a service and generate a link behind the scenes.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#90

Post by Sophira »

ripe wrote: post #75
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.

The closest I've found to having a modern experience to programming in that manner is DragonRuby Game Toolkit [0]. It's not free (with some exceptions for eligible users and indie game developers), but it does offer a standard version for a one-off payment, which is the version I have. It's sold as a game dev toolkit but it brings back those same memories of BASIC for me. I firmly believe that it could be a very viable method of introducing programming as well.

If you bought either of the two itch.io bundles "Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality" or "Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid", then you have the Standard license already included in that bundle. It's well worth a look IMO.

(Not affiliated other than a very happy user.)

[0] https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game

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