Hacker News Reader

Comment by noahlt | Hacker News Reader

It's not.

The author didn't say "popular" he said "relevant"

The current state of software development has huge issues with needless complexity resulting from poorly chosen abstractions.

Gopher and IRC make it possible to use any client of your choosing, thus keeping innovation and improvements accessible to anyone with an idea.

> Gopher and IRC make it possible to use any client of your choosing, thus keeping innovation and improvements accessible to anyone with an idea.

I agree to the former and disagree to the latter---they are not correlated. In fact, IRC has demonstrated that it might be hard to adapt to new requirements without breaking many things (no matter it's an existing client, a community or a requirement itself). Today the relevance of IRC is mostly due to the existing community and not due to the technical innovation, and casual users wouldn't benefit from that. I don't know much about Gopher but I haven't seen any counterevidence to this observation.

The new(ish) IRCv3 standard does not break compatibility with existing clients though. If they don't support all of its features, they just have less things displayed.

I know IRCv3 is in progress, and I wish it to be successful, but frankly speaking this has been done 10 years ago.

Some of the more recent IRC clients already support most its new features, including v3.1.

I don't get why this is getting down voted.

I heard gopher before but never used it. I have two browsers (firefox and chrome) and gopher links failed on both. So I checked wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Native_Gophe...

And it is not supported in any of 4 most commonly used browser (except there is an add-on for firefox, you can write an add-on for anything anyway). (Edit: 5 actually, I forgot about Safari)

So yeah, Gohper is not relevant now.

Relevancy is a measure of subjective scope. Things that are relevant to some might be irrelevant to others. Gopher might not be relevant to society as a whole but to a subset of hackers (hi!). Parent's comment is effortless snark so it deserves any downvote it acquires.

Something relevant to a negligible minority is usually expressed as: not relevant. Relevancy is not totally subjective, as we don't live alone in basements, but in a society. Something relevant for the most of the/a society is relevant. Other stuff is called niche, irrelevant, because it has no effect on the life of the society.

Nuclear physics interests a handful of people only, yet it is relevant, as society would have problems sustaining its operation without nuclear power. Gopher is interesting for even less people, and it is irrelevant, as society would go on just as well without it.

Low processing power need? A 10$ Raspberry Pi packs more power than the notebook I saved for 10 years ago.

A link to all known gopher servers? It is, in gopher protocol, which I cannot check as none of my browsers support this. This is what is your definition to relevancy is? Because it is not mine.

A webpage written in Nepali is infinitely more relevant to most users, as they can access it, and use everyday tools (like google translate) to have an idea in the page.

Gopher is about as relevant as the International Toothpick Collector Association's Annual Report on the Proceedings of Toothpick Size Irregularities.

I don't think I've ever read anything so passionate about Gopher.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com