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#off-topic
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2015-11-23
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danielstockton10:11:54

do people really prefer slack to irc? its a shame so much activity moved here imo

borkdude10:11:12

@danielstockton: it has pros and cons. The pro is that there are more people here now than there were ever on IRC.

danielstockton10:11:49

i suppose, but do we want those people?

danielstockton10:11:14

it's harder to keep up-to-date with everything split over multiple slack channels and irc

danielstockton10:11:28

but its good that there's more activity overall

jaen10:11:59

Compared to IRC I quite like the fact that Slack has search (or rather, would if it weren't a free account) and you don't loose messages when you're offline.

jaen10:11:08

And yeah, it seems more active than the freenode channels

jaen10:11:39

Plus it's an umbrella site for all the satellite projects like reagent or immutant or whatever.

danielstockton10:11:53

freenode has lazybot though, which is saving all the logs

danielstockton10:11:59

so you don't lose messages there either

danielstockton10:11:33

and i find it much easier to read through those than slack, which is imo a noisy interface

danielstockton10:11:45

i don't need to see everyones avatar

jaen10:11:56

TIL freenode actuall has logs

kevinmershon14:11:30

@danielstockton I totally felt the same way for the first few months after my team convinced me to standardize us on Slack. It's jarring having the excess information (after coming from IRC), for sure. For my team, I enabled the slack IRC gateway and for awhile I used either to communicate with the team. But alas, eventually the web interface won out

malch14:11:39

@danielstockton: You can enable 'Compact' mode in Preferences

kevinmershon14:11:57

I see Slack winning over IRC long-term for the same reason web applications are winning out over thick clients and installed applications. Convenience and ease of access. Anyone can hit a URL and join a Slack community, and the presentation is overall more friendly to casuals. IRC, though still quite simple to use, I feel is indisputably more difficult than Slack to learn.

danielstockton14:11:08

@malch: that's definitely an improvement

malch14:11:52

Glad could help 😉

danielstockton14:11:11

kevinmershon: agree but most clojure developers aren't casuals

kevinmershon14:11:30

Granted, but it's good to be a welcoming environment to the full spectrum of skills, especially rookies and junior developers who want to learn and improve

jaen16:11:34

Well, maybe most Clojure developers aren't casuals and don't mind IRC, but if by having Slack you can save just one person from starting to learn programming with Java, then it's worth it P ;

mpenet16:11:25

kevinmershon: well irc is 25yo, I have seen it declared dead many times, and it's still going very strong

mpenet16:11:30

@kevinmershon: also slack is closed/proprietary, could be bought tomorrow by X and change radically (for the worse or better) for instance

kevinmershon16:11:56

@mpenet: By no means am I saying IRC is dead!

mpenet16:11:16

didn't say that :]

kevinmershon16:11:32

And yes, I agree that with Slack's closedness we face an unknowable future as far as its viability for a long term stable community platform.

kauko18:11:18

I’ve been using IRC for about a dozen years, still use it all the time and like it a lot, but it’s very easy to see why some people would prefer Slack

kauko18:11:52

Also, other than Slack being proprietary, I can’t really to point to anything that would make me rate IRC higher than Slack

kauko18:11:05

granted, the whole closed source thing is pretty important

licenser18:11:26

I find IRC less disruptive, plus it has better tooling (for me), and the open protocol is a biggy too simple_smile

kauko18:11:06

Have you tried Compact mode for Slack? It’s pretty minimalistic I think, though it’s a shame I can’t hide the channel bar

kauko18:11:42

I use irssi as my IRC client, so it doesn’t have a permanent channel bar, just the numbers on the bottom when something happens

kauko18:11:56

which is nice

licenser18:11:27

oh disruptive as in work flow wise, I've accepted ignoring IRC for most of the time and only look when I want to. Slack is like nagging and demanding attention, esp when it is also used for work. I havn't gotten to the point where I can ignore it and not feel bad

kauko18:11:43

ooh right

kauko18:11:28

Hmm well, in a way that’s also its strength I suppose simple_smile

licenser18:11:15

probably depends on the kind of stuff you do

j-po18:11:28

I guess you could aggressively mute noisy channels.

kauko18:11:32

I think you can change notification settings etc per team, and I think they’re working on making Slack work better for public channels / teams. To be honest, using Slack as a public forum like this feels kind of.. hacky

kauko18:11:42

the whole “request an invite” thing

j-po18:11:06

As a startup employee, I have to say I prefer the more disruptive medium 😛.

sveri18:11:29

Jeez, every disruption is bad. For notifications the pull principle should be the only allowed on. Push is so bad in that regard.

kevinmershon22:11:24

I think it's absolutely hilarious how we've been discussing Slack's longterm viability and stability for the community, and here it's suffering intermittent downtime today.

eggsyntax22:11:30

I was pretty amused by that one too simple_smile

eggsyntax22:11:44

This was my favorite Twitter response: "The @SlackHQ engineers right now https://media.giphy.com/media/dbtDDSvWErdf2/giphy.gif "

richiardiandrea23:11:15

http://elbenshira.com/blog/the-end-of-dynamic-languages/ <- Dynamic languages are dead, don't want to flame, but for me of course no! 😄