>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.