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Comment by dade_ | Hacker News Reader

I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.

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I've tried to give IRC a chance a few times, but it always felt like there were a few too many odd little things to learn before I could be productive and comfortable. I didn't get used to it and dropped it. It never felt inviting.

I use slack at work and love it. I fully agree that it isn't that different from IRC and I hate that it's another walled garden (of sorts), but it fixes a lot of the little annoyance in dealing with IRC.

I probably wouldnt hire a developer that didn't use IRC

Because in the skillset of developers, IRC is such a difficult one to acquire?

Grep isn't a difficult skill to acquire but I wouldn't hire someone that didn't know it. Some skills can be good proxies for a range of other skills an experience and a lot of developers are in that "don't know what they don't know" range.

Sure, I just have to disagree on IRC being a good indicator for that.

Also, fwiw, most of my colleagues use IDE "search project for string" in places where I use grep. Also, if I'm being honest, you should hire nearly all of them before you hire me.

I think you've picked two false flags.

I've been IRCing for 24 years. I know about bouncers, different clients, etc., and I still prefer Slack to IRC.

I like knowing that it's going to handle unicode properly, in all cases, for everyone on the Slack channel. I like that it handles right-to-left text for everyone reading.

I like not having to ever think about, is my bouncer down? I also like not having to think about, where am I going to run my bouncer? It's nice not having to think about that stuff at all. I've got a lot on my plate, keeping a bouncer up and running somewhere (just so I don't lose history!) doesn't need to be another thing I do.

I like the plugins, the integrations with various other services. I like the convenience and polish. No IRC client compares to Slack for integrations and polish. It takes friction out of my daily chat experience.

I've even moved some private irc channel chats to Slack channels, because it's just a more pleasant experience in 2017. No regrets about any of that.

I think these are all key points. The user experience in Slack is so easy, convenient and polished. It takes friction away from communication, allowing effort to be focused on the tasks at hand.

I used IRC a lot as a teen back in the late 80s early-to-mid 90s. This was back when to make a private channel you would have to join a channel that was a negative number and hope nobody else wandered in on a guess (which was unlikely to happen since the number of users was literally under 200 at peak times). Pre-Eris, Pre-EFNet, etc.

Despite the nostalgic kick of it, I never used it as a serious work tool at any of my jobs, haven't used IRC at all in probably a decade, and totally agree that options like Slack are just plain better work communication tools.

I used IRC a bit in the mid 90s when I first encountered this whole internet thingy. Even though I was young and dumb, it struck me as a bit lame: nerd bullshit with fiddly setup. The async aspects of usenet and email struck me as more scalable, and the web had, you know... graphics.

I had to use IRC again in 2015, and pretty much nothing had changed, except now I was 20 years older.

Most of the criticisms of Slack seem to boil down to: this (whatever it is) is something IRC could do. But it (whatever it is) is virtually always something IRC doesn't do, something it does in some half-arsed fashion (that requires a huge amount of fiddly setup), or something that's supported by only a few clients. How is this not obvious? I'm perpetually mystified that anybody would admit in public to not understanding why Slack is taking a massive dump on IRC.

(Criticisms of Slack's closed nature are valid. It's also worth asking why it has to take up 2GBytes of RAM just to show a tree view, an HTML view and a text box! But don't tell me that you can't understand why Slack is winning anyway.)

I don't even know how to shoe a horse.

"And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it."

It's not a generational thing - it's a "lifer" vs. "non-lifer" thing.

Some people are coding with computers because it's an exciting, lucrative career with great benefits!

Other people are coding with computers because they can't imagine doing anything else, and would do it for free if IT wasn't central to business in the 21st century.

I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it just is.

I don't think it's a generational thing either. I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it. The problem is the difference in the amount of energy demanded by the set-up process. Connecting to Slack is extremely simple and I don't have to fiddle with the settings in order to get a decent experience.

Compared to IRC, I have to:

  - Figure out how to configure my client.
  - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots on Freenode or $other_server.
  - Figure out how to set up something like ZNC in order to federate the client on my phone with the client on my laptop so I don't miss messages.
  - ...

It's an epic yak shave that sucks massive amounts of time and energy a from the thing I joined the community to do: improve a piece of software that isn't IRC.

The benefit, though, is once you are set up with IRC, joining new channels is a breeze, especially since most open source software uses a single network (Freenode). All I have to do is type something like

  /join #rust-lang

and I'm in the new channel. Compare this with Slack, where, no matter how many teams you've joined in the past, you have to go through the exact same rigamarole to join a new Slack team.

Discord avoids that issue by having a global identifier, similar to your connection to an IRC network.

However, having that global identifier / IRC network connection is a tradeoff - it forces you to use a single consistent identity for every single interaction on that network. For some people this is a plus; for others it is a negative. Slack's teams option allows people to use different identities for different instances.

> I know how to use IRC and how to connect with it.

> [...]

> - Figure out how to configure my client.

> - Figure out how to interact with the user account and moderation bots

I disagree with your initial claim. :P

Those are irc basics, things you only have to learn once, and there is documentation online and on the web. It's worth it to spend the time to learn a tool that you can use throughout your profession, even as the proprietary flavor-of-the-month services come and go.

That still ignores the existence of a huge usability problem. The investment of time may pay off in the long run, but IRC is large enough investment (and ongoing maintenance, ZNC doesn't just take care of its self forever) that people will take a route of less resistance when presented.

This all reminds of a few years ago when folks were banging on about how we needed to use Gitorious instead of GitHub for Open Source hosting. Gitorious is dead now and it wasn't until GitLab came along and recognized the usability problem that we got a viable Open Source alternative.

Same thing has happened in gaming with the introduction of Discord. No one wants to bother with mumble, team speak, or vent.

Trying to get everyone in our group setup with mumble was a pain for the people who only use their computer to game. When we switched to Discord it took maybe 10 minutes to get our group of ten all in one chat.

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