[simias]

That's not equivalent though, with IRC scripting you can do whatever you want. With Slack or Discord you do whatever Slack or Discord allows you to do. You also don't have to worry about features becoming unavailable or gimped in the future.

[dmitriid]

It is equivalent. It is also the reason why Slack and others have taken the world by storm, and why IRC and XMPP are more or less dying. Because Slack (and FB messenger, and Apple Messages, and Discord, and... and...) provide an out-of-the-box experience immediately available to anyone (including non-programmers or programmers who couldn’t care less about scripting a yet another barebones app).

And the problems continue beyond just scripting another app. The world is mobile, and old protocols have missed the memo.

[u801e]

> It is also the reason why Slack and others have taken the world by storm

The same thing could have been said about messaging clients like ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger etc. vs IRC, but none of them remain while IRC is still actively used.