How to write an IRC bot
As much as I like IRC, I don&#x27;t get why the author hates slack so much. I dislike slack (probably because of the culture in Slack groups) but I do think that having a mobile app &amp; ease of use is why Slack is okay. Not having to deal with different servers &amp; terminology that look scary also helps (a lot) for most people using Slack.<p>Most people who use Slack haven&#x27;t ever used IRC professionally (or at all) - I&#x27;ve shown IRC to people who love Slack and I usually get &quot;Ugh, it looks so old fashioned and difficult to use&quot; as a reaction. Looks matters a lot if you want people to use it - most IRC clients are old or have designs based on old clients.<p>Plenty of Slack clones out there that look decent that have similar business models. What would be awesome if there&#x27;s an IRC server that looked and acted like Slack; nice features like:<p>- a website to log into like Slack (with benefits like modern web design and Github, Twitter, Facebook login).
- an irc client that looks decent on website, desktop and phone clients (and doesn&#x27;t run on electron).
- having multiple channels for one company like Slack channels in a group. IRC currently requires you to register several channels (which is annoying).<p>------------<p>As for the difficulty in writing bots for Slack vs IRC, sure it&#x27;s easier to write stuff for Slack because:<p>- most Slack bots&#x2F;services are written by companies who want their third party services to be easily integrated into whatever team communication their client use.<p>- most custom bots are variation of some bots that someone else has written (anecdotal evidence but pretty sure it&#x27;s true). I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s not that different for irc.<p>- most people don&#x27;t bother writing bots unless they&#x27;re willing to play around with bots; difficulty isn&#x27;t an issue when it comes to writing one and I haven&#x27;t seen bot development treated as an actual task (it&#x27;s more of a hack that works and isn&#x27;t really touched again.)<p>------------<p>Honestly, this seems to be a case where the author neglects how real-life people work in favor of code &quot;niceness&quot; (for lack of a better term). There&#x27;s a reason why most people use Microsoft products (and it isn&#x27;t because they make great software.)