> A major, hugely successful product, that is in the market for 32 years, and has seen many implementations, both on client as well as on server side, must be "

> A major, hugely successful product, that is in the market for 32 years, and has seen many implementations, both on client as well as on server side, must be "mature". No?! No. HTTP/HTML are mature; IRC is just old :P The IRC ecosystem is as if we’d reached HTTP/0.9 + HTML/1.0, and everybody collectively agreed to just stay there forever for some reason. “Mature” to me implies that a product has spent many years iterating on a design to reach, at the very least, a local maxima - ideally getting past that and evolving to keep up with the rest of the industry. IRC on the other hand, seems to have had a couple of years of work at the start, and then remained set in stone for 30 years...