Simplicity of IRC

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 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.

While that is true, most of those who wrote bots did not meaningfully interact with the protocol because they used abstractions (eggdrops, mirc scripts, etc). The simplicity of the protocol was unrelated, as a well abstracted library for any other protocol or even service (such as twitter) can be as simple.

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 ago when a computer might dump you practically straight into BASIC when you turned it on or you might get access to a mainframe/minicomputer with programming tools already set up. Nowadays, an ‘easy’ introduction could involve the horrific process of installing and setting up python on windows (where it is hard to do things other than input/output text) or editing some html/JavaScript files where there are more easily possible interactive things but lots of things are difficult like ‘just drawing things’ or anything that requires a server side.

P.S. if you, like me, were wondering what Libera Chat is, it’s the moral successor of Freenode with Freenode now being a shell of its former self.

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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 important subsystems hooked up to our internal IRC server: Monitoring and alerting. Source control and Wiki activity. The deployment pipeline. Ticket activity reports. All these services were pretty much effortlessly set up to provide useful, real-time status information broadcast to topic-specific channels users could idle in. Everyone could stay informed on topics of their interest, in real time, with no barrier to entry. It was really good, and the implementation completed in a few hours total, for all use-cases, due to irc's incredible simplicity.

Due to the benefits I had reaped from that setup before, I tried to implement parts of it on/for the MS Teams platform at the then-new job. Getting the Teams Python SDK to implement a bot-like entity running alone proved to be a days-long ordeal, and whatever followed wasn't much more pleasant.

In the end, we let someone set up two email-to-teams-channel-forwards which kinda worked, but suffered from obnoxious, multi-minute relay delays.

As a consequence of the tedious bringup and the latency shortcoming, the "effortless notification" initiative never really got traction.

Not only because of this particular experience I am a firm believer that software/system simplicity is a virtue that can neither be overstated in importance, nor substituted by anything else.