I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences." The parent comment really captures the additional use-cases which make Slack much more productive for developers discussing code.
> I think most of the "Why not IRC?" sentiment comes from a viewpoint of "I only use chat for sending short, ASCII sentences."
Most IRC clients support unicode. Also, I've never had an issue just using an internal pastebin to share code-snippets with other devs. If we needed to work on code together, we would use an application like remote desktop or a shared screen session.
I absolutely cannot see why people still recommend IRC today for work use. It can pretty much only do text for the moment you're online and no we don't have time (money) to hack IRC to meet our needs.
