Well I still haven't seen a modern chat application which gives all the IRC features. Its like they have deliberately removed all the good features.

Yeah, and one of the most important features of IRC being "lightweight native client, integrating seamlessly with my environment". Somehow, these "modern" chat systems just can't do that.

Because that would require opening up either the client or the protocol, both of which are anathema to people trying to make money from those systems.

Being optimized for communication and being optimized for making money are mutually exclusive goals.

I’ve never used IRC before, so I’m honestly curious, what features does IRC have that Slack(/Discord) don’t or can’t have through extensions like bots and plugins?

slack is based on IRC

real time typing in icq was pretty cool. I wonder if any other system ever replicated that?

ytalk :P

Just show me the console log...

Change the font, write it sideways in a frame, viola - progress bar!

Oh yes. I have tried to introduce jupyter notebooks with pandas to data analysts so many times, but they always want to do it in excel.

Wet