I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.

I remember doing an "AI" bot that you could talk to. If it recognized any words you said it would get a random predefined string from a .txt and send it to you. And a lot of "hacking" scripts. Fun times.

Same. In the 2000s the mIRC scripting scene was buzzing, so many interesting scripts pushing the boundaries of the language to the point of binding directly into the Win32 API to do pretty much anything. We had music players, custom GUIs, bots, colour themes, all hand crafted by teenagers. I used to spend all my days chatting and browsing mircscripts.org

It’s weird how that scene has just disappeared and no one seems to have written about it in retrospective. I keep thinking I should be the one to write about an article about that long lost art, but it’s so long ago and memory is a bit hazy.

I was so annoyed when I moved to Linux and I had to chat with KVIRC which was so inflexible and rigid compared to mIRC.

Same. One of my first forays into scripting. TCL for eggdrops too. Spent a lot of time and energy on IRC :)

> I started coding in the early 2000s in mIRC Scripting. It felt like magic. With only a few lines I could add stuff to the context menus, write auto responses, etc.

You could write entire projects in mIRC, there was more or less nothing you could not do.

You can write custom UIs, use raw TCP/UPP sockets.. you could write mIRC in mIRC.

It was in its time quite empowering. Very few languages were mature enough to truly compete with it for simplicity in it's time (even Visual Basic, which would win out on UI, but lose on sockets etc)

Me too! I still remember /perform, and even more fondly when I figured out how to create dialogs that would then trigger slash commands.

NoNameScript was extremely inspiring in that regard. Not to mention the color theme of Brevduva Script.

Good times!