"How long does it take me to build an IRC bot" was my test for trying new languages for a long time.

You need to:

  - open a TCP connection to a specific port and keep it open
  - check for PING/PONG messages asynchronously and automatically
  - parse a bunch of kinda-sorta RFC defined strings and parse them to a structure of some sort
  - and if you want to be fancy, you can start storing all kinds of stuff what happens on channels and keep a in-memory state of everything and (try to) keep it in sync
  - on a pro-level you need to be able to have multiple TCP connections open to multiple servers (different irc networks) and not mix up channel #hackernews on network A with #hackernews on network B

That sounds like a fun thing to build - if only someone I knew used IRC…

It still is, it reveals flaws in language ecosystems pretty quickly. Lisp was the fastest to fail, just because of the tedium required to open a TCP socket and keep it open =)

Telegram/Discord/Slack bots are a fun project too, but they're a lot easier because they are asynchronous by default.