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>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 la
by iqanq 5y ago
>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.
- FemmeAndroid 5y agoIs this true? It’s not my experience. My first meaningful programs were raw socket IRC clients as a teenager explicitly because they were simpler to figure out than using things like egg drop. That isn’t to say that most fully featured tools were written from scratch — I can’t speak to that one way or another. But I know a lot of people who were learning about internet protocols by using telnet to interact directly with IRC servers then transferring that knowledge into a socket-level reimplementation of the protocol. RFC1459 certainly proved to me that RFCs can be simple and worth reading. And the whole experience taught me early that a simple enough, well documented protocol could be easier to use than a wrapper library in a foreign language. I certainly use a lot of libraries these days, but those lessons have served me extremely well.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anthk 5y agoWith ii you can write a bot today with any language reading and writting to files. Even with sh.
- corobo 5y agoAdmittedly my first bot was indeed in mIRCScript and its abstractions but it wasn't long before I had a !spawn command that was a function that connected sub-bots directly to IRC as a protocol because why not I guess Also wrote a script that sent email directly for tinkering purposes, later used that protocol knowledge to get my first tech job haha "how does email work?" "how in-depth do you want?"
- lewiscollard 5y agoI dunno, I was there in the very early 2000s and as I remember it, for the subset of programmers I knew on IRC at the time, it was as Susam says: writing a shitty IRC bot - not a script, something from "scratch" that actually spoke the IRC protocol - was almost a rite of passage back then. From rose-tinted me-tinted glasses, I seem to remember that IRC-bot-related questions were a plurality of the questions asked in #vb on Dalnet back in the day! You are also right to some extent as well; I wonder how much mIRC scripting has been underestimated as the gateway drug to programming for thousands. (Rose-tinted/me-tinted disclaimer: the first non-trivial program I wrote was an IRC quote bot, in Visual Basic. I later rewrote it into Python, because I wanted to learn Python, which eventually led to my day job today...)
- littlecranky67 5y agoEqually rose-tinted user here. My first unix service ever configured and started, was eggdrop (and it took me hours to get it running on a shell account).