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Simplicity of IRC

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#131

Post by alkonaut »

lambdaba wrote: post #84
alkonaut wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We just need more modern terminals

Yeah like smartphone apps , webapps, and desktop guis…

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#132

Post by franga2000 »

u801e wrote: post #125
franga2000 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more "under control of the enterprise" than a self-hosted IRC server?

It doesn't prevent clients from logging communications in that server. I know the same is possible in slack or teams, but they don't consider that from a legal perspective.

From a legal, practical and technical perspective, any window displayed on any screen is equally succeptible to logging. I can't imagine the fact that the company disabled ctrl+c in the policy settings making any difference in a liability case.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#133

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Reminds me of this visualization[1]. The amount of code it takes to simply draw a triangle in OpenGL 1.x, OpenGL 3+, and Vulcan

The learning curve has been sacrificed. It's now a learning cliff for everything. We've used to have computers that make it simple to do simple things and hard to do complex things. Now, just so it can be slightly less hard to do complex things, we've made it hard to learn and do simple things.

1: https://twitter.com/sol_hsa/status/1174233868536356866

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#134

Post by jjulius »

thenerdhead wrote: post #93

I miss IRC. The simplicity in design is one thing. I think the other part I miss is the pseudonyms and having an identity not be directly attached is another. I remember joining so many IRC channels to learn about everything in college. You'd get help and be humbled by the many regular names in each channel. There was more of a human element to it as most people simply acted as extensions of themselves. You think abo…

Totally agree! Just one ever-so-minor nitpick...

>When things were simple with a single pseudonym and a message, things were great. Now things are much more complex. Threads, DMs...

IRC has DMs too, /msg

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#135

Post by erwincoumans »

gbear605 wrote: post #129
erwincoumans wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is just one installer on Windows and there are tons of pip installable packages, for 2d or 3d graphics, GUI, sound/midi, math/data and whatever you can think of. Tons of docs and tutorials or colabs. How is that not easy?

A friend of mine was recently taking a course on machine learning and she had to use Python with some packages for the homework assignments. She downloaded VSCode and installed Python on her machine and then attempted to get the packages installed with pip. They weren’t showing up in the VSCode terminal though. Somehow she had six different installations of Python, one of Python 3 living inside of a VSCode namespace,…

In such cases, it maybe better to just use Google Colab.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#136

Post by qsort »

magpi3 wrote: post #20
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. Somet…

I think there's a difference between intrinsic complexity and accidental complexity, though.

You're right to observe that programming involves irreducible complexity (one of the reasons why so many low code/no code tools fail is the refusal to accept this, imo), on the other hand modern toolchains are extremely complicated and could be a little more streamlined.

It's a meme at this point, but there's no way having six different pythons on your machine or whatever the hell modern JS toolchains do -- just to pick two examples -- is the simplest it can possibly be.

Older machines and toolchains certainly had their problems (arguably even worse ones), but I completely understand the complaints.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#137

Post by surajrmal »

ryandrake wrote: post #133
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…

Reminds me of this visualization[1]. The amount of code it takes to simply draw a triangle in OpenGL 1.x, OpenGL 3+, and Vulcan The learning curve has been sacrificed. It's now a learning cliff for everything. We've used to have computers that make it simple to do simple things and hard to do complex things. Now, just so it can be slightly less hard to do complex things, we've made it hard to learn and do simple thin…

In the case of graphics, the only thing that's changed is the abstraction layer which is stable. Most folks won't use Vulkan directly, but rather through a layer which they have control to optimize or fix bugs in if they need to. Learning graphics programming will never start directly with Vulkan programming. I suppose there are benefits to make the standard, stable API easy to work with as a beginner, but there are plenty of great open source projects that fill that niche.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#138

Post by Ekaros »

superkuh wrote: post #123
jokoon wrote: post #87

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.

It'd be nice if as a society we stopped making all software worse in order to make up for smartphone's many limitations.

IRC clearly had same problems already back in the day when many users were still on dial-up connections...

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#139

Post by andrewmcwatters »

I never used IRC growing up, to my knowledge, though I'm sure I used it by proxy in software that used it under the hood.

Instead, I grew up with AOL Instant Messenger, and then MSN Messenger which later became Windows Live Messenger, then Skype, Xfire, Pidgin and Trillian as clients, then back to Skype again, and now Discord, which is where I still reside most of the time today.

When I thought about existing chat protocols I wanted to use in game engines and websites that would allow one to connect through existing clients without having to join the game or navigate to the website in question directly, I thought about IRC.

But it seems like people use Matrix now, and it just hasn't caught on to my circle of friends. If I'm not mistaken, it almost seems like FOSS Discord.

I was recently introduced to it by a member of a community of very friendly Quake Mappers. I wonder if there is primarily first a cultural barrier to these technologies and not a technical one. As usually I find more technical people on IRC than on Discord.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#140

Post by lambdaba »

alkonaut wrote: post #131
lambdaba wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We just need more modern terminals Yeah like smartphone apps , webapps, and desktop guis…

Those are apps, I mean a glue / universal interface layer that's 100% owned by the user
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