"Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC channels and mailing lists, they're going to Discord servers and Reddit, sorry to break it to you.

"Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC channels and mailing lists, they're going to Discord servers and Reddit, sorry to break it to you. Nobody below the age of thirty is using these old tools unless they're specifically working in spaces where they're used such as kernel dev or they want to be a hipster. I imagine the count of developers on Discord already outnumbers IRC 100:1. Say what you want about these services being privacy infringing and proprietary (trust me, I don't like them either) but let's not be deluded. Their predecessors will die.