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Simplicity of IRC

susam.net

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Re: Simplicity of IRC

#121

Post by franga2000 »

lloeki wrote: post #106
deberon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would IRC even work in that nameless enterprise?

Technically, yes. In real life, no. I don't even blame such enterprises because most of the time it comes from regulations or outside policies that customers mandate, something like all enterprise data (and thus communication) has to be firmly under control of the enterprise with hard guarantees, otherwise you just don't get to work with those customers. So you get a locked down Slack/Teams, and the email+calendar sy…

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

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#122

Post by williamtwild »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #80
fivea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem is that you think bash is a programming language.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#123

Post by superkuh »

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.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#124

Post by littlecranky67 »

lewiscollard wrote: post #67
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…

I dunno, I was there in the very early 2000s and as I remember it, for the subset of programmers I knew on IRC at the time, it was as Susam says: writing a shitty IRC bot - not a script, something from "scratch" that actually spoke the IRC protocol - was almost a rite of passage back then. From rose-tinted me-tinted glasses, I seem to remember that IRC-bot-related questions were a plurality of the questions asked in…

Equally rose-tinted user here. My first unix service ever configured and started, was eggdrop (and it took me hours to get it running on a shell account).

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#125

Post by u801e »

franga2000 wrote: post #121
lloeki wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, yes. In real life, no. I don't even blame such enterprises because most of the time it comes from regulations or outside policies that customers mandate, something like all enterprise data (and thus communication) has to be firmly under control of the enterprise with hard guarantees, otherwise you just don't get to work with those customers. So you get a locked down Slack/Teams, and the email+calendar sy…

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.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#126

Post by harikb »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #120
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 think it is unfair / nonsensical to compare Teams (or Slack or Discord) to IRC. IRC is an open protocol for creating chat networks, not a desktop client. The user expierence from IRC could differ vastly depending on which client you use (mIRC, xchat, irssi...). But it shows how in todays world we create this silos/islands of proprietary solutions that are not inter-operable.

GP is comparing the integration experience and API layer.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#127

Post by alkonaut »

u801e wrote: post #114
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.

> Requiring a second app to do it (posting a link) isn’t nearly as good a UX as simply pasting in pictures. But what about the UX of other people in the channel? Someone posts an image and the previous text is moved off screen. Now they have to scroll up to read what they were just reading. What about the case where someone posts an animated gif which becomes a distraction that requires you to stop the animation or h…

Auto playing animation can be a client setting. As can rendering pictures at all.

Regardless, the UX of slack, discord, teams etc. is different from IRC because it’s what people expect from an IM client

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#128

Post by codys »

ferdowsi wrote: post #83
lambdaba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Slack has made using their API much trickier over time: getting a token to post these days (officially) is under the control of the server admin (as one needs to add a "slack app" to get one). One can extract a token and some cookies from a web browser slack session still, but it's not as clean as it used to be (where one could just generate account associated tokens that didn't randomly expire).

In other words:

- to use the slack APIs, you probably need company level buy in _before_ any code is written against the API from IT folks

- in contrast, with IRC one could just try something out and at some point in the future _maybe_ create a seperate IRC account for it, if your IRC server even has logins enabled. If it doesn't, which when I worked for IBM was the case, one can just pick a new username for the IRC bot.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#129

Post by gbear605 »

erwincoumans wrote: post #111
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…

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, one each of Python 2 and 3 living in a global location, and one each of Python 2 and 3 living in a user-specific location, and a Python installed by Anaconda. Calling python, python3, pip, and pip3 in all went to different Python installations. The VSCode installation didn’t seem to have pip at all, even with python -m pip. I managed to eventually sort it all out for her, but it took me over two hours to figure it out, and I’m a professional programmer who uses Python in my daily job. I admittedly don’t use Windows everyday, but it was a huge mess and I have no idea how it happened.

Computers are complex, and people who don’t work closely with them daily can easily get very confused.

Re: Simplicity of IRC

#130

Post by alkonaut »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #89
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.

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

That’s what any client does of course. But the default should be to also display the images (or clickable miniatures). Nothing that can’t be solved in any protocol - but you are both having to duct tape several services (a poor UX for the maintainer of the service) and what you are creating is basically converging on any of the modern alternatives.
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