IRC chatrooms got me much more comfortable with touch-typing than programming. There is too much time spent thinking when programming to feel slowed down by looking at the keyboard. IRC chats mean you have to be fast if you don't want the conversation to have moved on before you finish your message.
I almost got into IRC ten years ago, when I was active in a programming community that used it in addition to their message board. The idea of having to keep my computer on all the time in order to stay in the loop, and having to learn yet another set of arcane commands for a chat window, was a big turn off then. I wouldn't even consider it today unless there was a specific need to use it, sorry.
I discovered IRC as a teenager in the 90s, and soon learned SMS-speak for rapid messaging. I was proud of how quickly I could write if I just wrote "u r" instead of "you are"... This was cool! In chatroom arguments, being able to belt out more sentences faster was better!
But as my typing improved, I realized the above was a childish optimization. Real skill was able to write out correctly-spelled sentences just as fast. I then saw the SMS-speak as immature shortcuts.
This realization carried over into code: good code is the clear, adequately verbose (but appropriately concise) kind. Code that tries to be overly-clever (of the "code golf" kind), was to be viewed with suspicion.
> Usability for non tech people. Not everyone in chat has technical prowess, I know IRC seems simple but its too intimidating for some.
I communicated via IRC with a lot of non-technical people in the '90s and 2000s. Most people just used mIRC and connected to the default IRC server and went from there.
I really would disagree. IRC didn't have a lot going on, you had channels and PMs and that was kind of it. It was very easy to learn how to use because there was very little to learn.
Not to mention, in most clients, it took significantly less than ten seconds for the text to appear on the screen after you started typing.
Agreed but I love it however I usually have IRC open on a different workspace in one of the channels I've hung out in for years so if I want to shoot the breeze with someone I can talk to them - I work for a manufacturing firm and I'm the only programmer so I can't really talk about my job in any depth with non-programmers anyway.
For sure! The fact is that IRC has existed parallel to the development of this entire industry so the desire to hang about in a chat room is real and should be served, but the modern incarnations of this are causing some people to stop cataloguing the small bits of necessary info about complex systems which i think is bad.
A quick few thoughts based on using IRC for 13-ish years:
• I like IRC because it is clean and a light-weight text-only interface (well, you could use emojis, if you wish). I prefer text-based conversations when possible. I'm equally fine with video, but text is far more effective for technical conversations.
• It is also less stressful for me, as I can respond in a more asynchronous manner, without any implicit pressure to immediately respond (e.g. the "$person is typing ..." notification).
• IRC 'stuck' with me, because I largely use it for upstream projects that I participate in.
• To avoid "boring questions" it is useful to put an etiquette "hint" in the channel topic, and gently point new users to it. E.g. I've written this some 8 years ago for a channel I used to moderate: https://www.rdoproject.org/contribute/irc-etiquette/
• Lastly, I recognize IRC's pros and cons, so I'm not religiously attached to it, and I'm fine to use other chat tools. I just don't want to become that guy in the last pane of this XKCD comic ;-) — https://xkcd.com/1782/
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