HACKER Q&A
📣 TekMol

Is there something as good / better as IRC for programming questions?


When I write code and have a question about - say - Python, I go to IRC in the Python channel and ask.

The experience is crazy good. Lot's of helpful (even though socially unapt) people who know Python in and out.

But I rarely read anything about IRC anywhere these days. Is there something new that offers the same functionlity?

I know many people use StackOverflow. But IRC is so much nicer, as you can have an instant conversation.

  👤 IshKebab Accepted Answer ✓
Have you actually tried StackOverflow? You get answers at a similar speed to IRC and it's much better for obscure questions - on IRC you'll just get nobody knowing the answer but on StackOverflow you will at least maybe get an answer in a few days/weeks/years.

But be warned, it's filled with similarly socially inept people and they can downvote/close your perfectly reasonable questions so be prepared for a decent amount of rage.

Even so it's definitely better than IRC IMO.

👤 gompertz
I'd actually like to see a service where you can hire a single person to answer all your questions. We have guitar and violin lessons where you go and practice then come back with questions - why not the same for programming languages? I'd gladly pay some one on a ad-hoc basis instead of filtering out all the noise on IRC/Discord.
👤 srer
IRC's influx of new users has been dropping off for a long time.

Personally I started using IRC 20 years ago, there were a lot of new users then.

The big IRCnets were massive[a] compared to today[b]. Today libera.chat is the biggest, but slowly dropping.

End result? IRC provides me direct access to a community that's ancient, with a notable lack of less experienced users. This is exceptionally helpful, I don't need a giant community to engage with, a few users with decades of experience in the topic I'm interested in is enough to answer almost all my questions :).

As such I would be rather surprised if there was a better option for real time answers.

I imagine usenet is a similar experience. An even older community with little influx of new users, ergo an even higher median experience level.

I expect I'll use IRC until I die, I can't say that for many things in technology.

[a] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2003 [b] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

👤 orf
The Python (and other languages) discord servers are the place to be.
👤 john_the_writer
No.. I see IRC melting away, but it's still so much nicer.

Slack has filled some of the gaps for me. I join groups of devs in my area, and I get to not only snag answers to questions, but network locally as well.

👤 JohnHaugeland
This is moving to Discord, which is largely web IRC
👤 bjourne
As long as you have the wherewithal to tolerate all the nasty users IRC can be really good. Comp.lang.python is gold too.
👤 ksaj
I use sdf.org. There is a chat system that covers the same kinds of things that irc covers. It is less chaotic than irc, and definitely has old fashioned vibes (it even has a lot of gopher!).

Nntp is still an ugly mess though. More spam than I've ever seen before.

👤 brianhorakh
For foss: Matrix.org, reddit, irc

For biz sponsored projects: zulip, gitter, slack, yammer

For crypto: discord, telegram