Is 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 ou

Is 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.