We do not use Slack, we use IRC for direct and fast communication. We do not use it for things that need RFCs and technical specifications, for that we use gitlab and other tools.
IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC that can be easily expanded with your logic/code.
Before there was a cloud and big data, we used IRC for handling distributed services as high availability central orchestration to which many services/servers connected that had IRC bots running on them. We had control over many machines and services from IRC channels, with full authorization/authentication, logging channels, you could run commands on one server or on many same time, you've seen real time error reporting or when node went down.
Can you share an image inline? Can you rapidly search the history? Can you customize alerts? Does it work reliably on mobile? You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC? Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?
Slack is great. I don't need to waste time writing bots because all of the tools I use already have simple integrations: GitHub, Box, DropBox, Intercom, etc. Doing all of that within IRC is a pain. For example: responding to an Intercom conversation from within Slack. I can set up Slack for an org in literally minutes. With IRC? Not literally minutes.
I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." The parent comment really captures the additional use-cases which make Slack much more productive for developers discussing code.
> I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences."
Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.
I absolutely cannot see why people still recommend IRC today for work use. It can pretty much only do text for the moment you're online and no we don't have time (money) to hack IRC to meet our needs.
Not inline, but you can share link to the image or send it to other person/persons via DCC directly, that's what you do on IRC.
> Can you rapidly search the history?
Sure, no problems with that, all the channels we use are logged and ready for advanced search.
> Can you customize alerts?
Yes.
> Does it work reliably on mobile?
Works for us.
> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?
I already answered that.
> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?
We don't do that on IRC.
If Slack works for you then great, it doesn't do anything for us. We have different workflow than you, which doesn't mean it's worse, it's just different. We don't need integration with dropbox, intercom etc, because we don't use them and we have IRC integration with tools we use already. We host all our tools and infrastructure and we need to control the whole stack.
I didn't said anywhere that new startup should go with IRC (unless you are already familiar with IRC with your team). I've shared my experience and opinion about IRC. We had infrastructure built around IRC already, we have a lot of experience with IRC and whole team knows IRC very well. I know some other teams that use IRC and they don't have any problems either.
You can always paste a link to an image hosting service and launch the viewer as a separate application. I don't really see why viewing the image in the same application as the rest of the text is seen as an advantage. If it's inline, it would eventually disappear from the screen as more messages are posted.
> Can you rapidly search the history?
I can use grep on the locally stored log files.
> Can you customize alerts?
That depends on the client.
> Does it work reliably on mobile?
The IRC client I have on my Nokia phone works just fine.
> You're debugging something and you want to share a screenshot, inline, how does that work on IRC?
Normally, you post a link to an image or pastebin service that shows the problem.
> Can you start audio or video calls with room participants?
You would have to use a separate application for that. FWIW, I use Slack in Firefox and that feature (at least the last time I tried it), didn't work. I had to install chrome to get it to work.
IRC is great and I am using it for 14+ years already. It's stable, fast, efficient and secure with lots of options. I've written a lot of IRC bots in many languages because protocol is so easy and every language have library/bot for IRC that can be easily expanded with your logic/code.
Before there was a cloud and big data, we used IRC for handling distributed services as high availability central orchestration to which many services/servers connected that had IRC bots running on them. We had control over many machines and services from IRC channels, with full authorization/authentication, logging channels, you could run commands on one server or on many same time, you've seen real time error reporting or when node went down.
It worked great and still works great.