Hacker News Reader

Comment by t0mas88 | Hacker News Reader

Funny, I did exactly what the article describes. When I was around 12 (previous century...) I learned a lot about coding from writing IRC bots in several languages.

In some ways things have become a lot easier, back in those days we had dial-up internet, no Stackoverflow and definitely no GenAI. But also harder, because protocols are now a lot more locked down, can't just sniff something and figure it out. And ecosystems like IRC have mostly been replaced by closed systems that you can't hack on.

View on HN

I had lots of fun coding mIRC scripts, and then also some standalone IRC bots, when I was 14 or so (including an ambitious unfinished project of an IRC-based MUD, as well as a quite successful conversational chatbot that many people downloaded and used to fool others, especially with the option of posing as a girl which I added as an afterthought, but was what the overwhelming majority of users chose). I'm now a CS professor, and several others I know who had the same hobby at the time in my city or whereabouts have rather successful careers as tech entrepeneurs or professors :)

I paid the mIRC license like 15 years later, by the way... better late than never... that guy really deserved it.

I haven't paid for a lot of software in my life. But I too paid for a mIRC license, happily even.

> I paid the mIRC license like 15 years later, by the way...

Probably not valid anymore, fairly recently he changed something requiring a new license.

Not that he doesn't deserve a new license after all these years.

I started writing bots and scripts in mIRC Scripting at around the same age, perhaps even a bit earlier. Back then, there were full-fledged bots (as in Nickserv, Chanserv, etc) for servers like UnrealIRCD that were entirely written in mIRC. I fondly remember those times as they were filled with lots of fun and opportunities to meet interesting people every day.

I did similar perhaps a touch later with some of the messenger protocols, MSN I think primarily. So long ago it's difficult to remember.

Not sure it'll ever be the same for my kids. Which is a shame, whatever the gains and there are some, I think we've lost something.

I did the same, writing IRC clients, bots and extension scripts from the age of 12.

Since you mentioned MSN, one thing I did in high school was connect an Eggdrop IRC bot via Bitlbee to MSN Messenger and hook it up with the MegaHAL module for text synthesis based on hidden Markov models. So basically, a chatbot on MSN. I trained it for a night to make it sound reasonable and respond well to various conversation, and I made it auto-accept connection requests and left it in training mode. Two weeks later, it was ruined. My kid sister's friends had all connected, and it now sounded like a 10 year old hyperactive psychopath. Strangely enough, it was a lot more authentic to them, since it spoke like them.

Tangential, but what are the examples of low end programming of this generation? There are of course bots for modern messaging apps like Telegram.

The first time I (gen z) had a run in with low-level tech was getting a Pi Pico and an ESP32 to talk to each other over the serial protocol. It's probably the only time I've had to get that down and dirty with a protocol. Writing messaging bots for modern apps are definitely fairly easy but it's unlikely you'd ever get that deep into the protocols of it all (probably something like json/graphql over http(s)).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com