Same. mIRC scripting was really what motivated me to learn to program. I had tinkered a little bit with BASIC before that, but mIRC was what kept me interested. It's one thing to write uninteresting "hello world" CLI apps, but mIRC scripting was something you and your friends could immediately interact with. I wonder if kids today have something similar...maybe Roblox scripting?

yeah I think the "this is immediately useful for me" part of mIRC scripting was a key driver in pushing kids to learn programming, and it seems lost in modern times.

But, perhaps, we're just not young anymore.

> maybe Roblox scripting

That, but also Discord is basically what people use on computers for communication today, and Discord also has bots.

Of course, you cannot just willy-nilly write your own client for a Discord bot without dealing with tons of hassle, compared to how easy it is to write something that uses the IRC protocol, so not sure it's the same "instant gratification".