> it's made with gawk.
gawk is always best when served live.
gawk is always best when served live.
Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now.
But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better.
But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl.
And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.
Any special reason? AFAIK, it's effectively the same network run by the same people, just under a different name.
Maybe matrix will recapture some of that platform-agnosticism? I haven't used it in a while and the general sentiment around the protocol seems vaguely negative these days (at least in channels like HN).
awk '{ print $2 }' foo.txt
perl -lane 'print $F[1]' foo.txt
>besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days
The thing is, people are NOT reachable on IRC in general. They join when they wake up (or return from school, or return from work). When they leave you can't contact them (and you can criticise/praise them freely if you want). Sometimes a new person joins and never returns again. Sometimes they join tomorrow, the day after, and become a regular. Other times someone starts joining less and less frequently, then one day leaves and never returns.
People say "hi" when joining and "bye" when leaving.
I'm general, I realized this is much more similar to talking with real people than modern groupchats. Of course this is just a protocol, and nowadays this behavior is just a choice (everyone can install a mobile client and stay always online. Even back then it was possible with a bouncer). But I'm surprised how invested I became in this micro-community, in a way i never would on a discord server.
Some projects have both a discord and an IRC channel and when you compare the two chats the conversations are wildly different — IRC being a more focused, on topic chat without floods of gifs, emojis, and off-topic channels.
The hardest part about using IRC is getting chat history and mobile notifications. As part of https://pico.sh we run a soju bouncer (soju.im) for our members to use to help with that. We have a bunch of daily active users.
The standard Discord experience has you look for and join a "server", each of which is meant to feel like distinct island. This has every server duplicate the same set of boilerplate #general, #off-topic etc. channels, as if there are no others. As a result the vast majority of servers are fairly dead and barren, the userbase is spread too thin. Also because the UX makes switching between servers a fairly heavy context switch, so monitoring this deluge of channels is not fun and nobody can stay on top of all of their servers.
I once looked around for maker-y/electronics Discords, and joined probably 7-8, and they were all dead. ##electronics on Libera is highly active.
This awk contraption is launched by inetd, and there's not much of any kind of sanity checks for anything. As a result, there was around ten thousand processes running :)
And also, thanks for showing interest. I'll push the source code on the website on the weekend.
If you have any ideas of the content I should push there, let me know.
Also, once you create a channel in Discord you cannot get rid of it without destroying chat history.
With IRC, you just /part without disrupting other people and even then you can go back and read chat logs, nicely persisted on your local disc as text files.
Again, in 1998, in the early perl 5 era, you'd be looked at as a nut if you seriously tried to argue for doing some new tool in awk, even a tiny script. Everything worked better in perl.
IRC is also different in the sense that it is federated, but when most people think about an IRC "server" they actually think about "networks".
This is true; the closest thing you can do is collapse the category that channels are in, and mute the ones you don't want to show up. Any new conversation in a channel will pop them out.
Discord (which is your mainstream competitor) is #1 in both even if it's also a terribly generic name.
I couldn't be happier if you dethroned Discord.
EDIT: Element is 3rd place in my mom's phone. Quite an achievement!
ZNC is an excellent way to keep history between your IRC sessions: https://github.com/znc/znc And WeeChat is an excellent companion to ZNC and libera.chat: https://github.com/weechat/weechat And IRC for Android is an excellent IRC client that also plays well with ZNC: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.countercul... Cheers!
if anyone wanna chat, stop by and/or hit me up on X!
Its not hard if the client isn't monolithic. I use ircs/ircx on Plan 9 which is a two part client: server that maintains connection to a network and channels the user joins. The server buffers incoming messages to a flat text file while the client just attaches to these buffers. I have a CPU server running 24/7 at home so it runs the server half and I can run the client on as many terminals as I want. It might be too simple but that is what I prefer.
https://github.com/leovilok/gem.awk
It needs OpenSSL or LibreSSL in order to create network connections.