[anilakar]

IRCv3 notwithstanding, the protocol from a software engineering point of view is horrible. It doesn't support asynchronous operations because responses cannot be tied to their corresponding requests, and many commands, successful or not, require a human to parse. Too bad that IRCnet only runs whatever has been written down in an official IETF RFC.

Despite all these deficiencies it's still widely used – My guess is that nobody has come up with a chat medium that would replace it completely. It's still pretty much the only decentralized, push-pull, clutter free real time discussion medium.