I was one of a million other teenagers who learnt it trying to write an IRC client in VB5/6.
I think my first introduction to "Turing tar-pit" style programming was trying to write an IRC client in mIRC script, which even sorta worked.
I did that too, before mIRC supported multiple servers, I loved mIRC script, now, not so much
I suppose that makes me one of the smaller handful of people who's learned the IRC protocol while making an iPhone app (Mobile Colloquy). And I even liked it so much that I then had to go and do some work on a second implementation of it (for Justin.tv's app)!