You're talking about https://github.com/zulip/zulip, right? It was open sourced in 2015.

I wouldn't describe Zulip as coming from the IRC tradition -- it was built by MIT students as an improvement on MIT's Zephyr. There's a split between line-at-a-time messaging like IRC or Slack, and paragraphs-at-a-time messaging with per-message channels like Zephyr, Gale, and now Zulip.

I really miss the paragraphs style.

Wait, why can't you type a paragraph at a time in IRC?

I said "paragraphs-at-a-time", not "paragraph-at-a-time". You can't type paragraphs at a time on IRC because a single message can't contain newlines.

But even then, paragraph-at-a-time is hard on IRC because there's a max line length that's surprisingly short (and usually just truncates the rest of your message once you exceed it!), and just because you'd stand out as being the person writing much more than everyone else and being slow to reply. IRC simply isn't a medium designed for carefully considered thought like that.

> a medium designed for carefully considered thought like that.

"Sorry this is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter."

You can type a paragraph if it is not too long, but you can't write several paragraphs.

I know I'm not supposed to talk about voting, but I'm going to anyway. Why are people upvoting me? The comment is completely useless because almost everything in it is wrong.

I upvoted you because "playing systemd" made me laugh. Also I hadn't heard of Zulip. Upvotes are cheap.

Zulip is open source: https://github.com/zulip/zulip

Where’s the other thread with Rob Pike?

There isn't one, because ... I'm not even sure what I was thinking, except that I probably should have gotten a few more hours of sleep last night.

Maybe I was thinking about this comment by someone else when I wrote that???: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kibwen