A truly wonky and stupid protocol that could've been done so much better. Good grief. And I say this not just being a permanent IRC resident since over 10 years, but having written both an IRC client and a bot-of-sorts.
It was easy for us to say this 15 years ago when a super-compact binary protocol just seemed to make oh so much sense, but now I'm not so sure.
The IRC protocol does exactly what it sets out to do, and there isn't really much over-the-wire overhead for client connections. The only information that's repeated unnecessarily is user hostmask data; everything else is mostly 100% useful.
It could really have only been a bit better if each event was described in a JSON- or YAML-like notation, but this was 1988, not 2008.
Compared to tons of other legacy protocols in use today (FTP!?), IRC isn't all that bad.
Well ... FTP was very early, RFC 114 in 1971 going by the titles (http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/) and only coming after (at that level) a logger protocol (had to do with setting up terminal service), terminal services and RJE.
But, yes, anyone who complains about a new boziod protocol should be forced to look at the wonders and horrors of FTP, especially in the context of NATs.
