skewp
Also, usually what you're learning in class are the fundamentals that undergird what you need to know for software development in the job. The basic underpinnings and context to understand what you're learning those first two weeks on the job.
And if you're going to be that dismissive about what you learn in a college course, I'll tell you most of what I learned the first two weeks on the job: how to use the specific IDE the team I was hired onto preferred, how to build their specific project (barely applicable outside the project), how to contact IT to get a ticket to get them to install the IDE because I didn't have permission to, how to use the timecard website to log my hours, where the people on my team prefer to go out for lunch, a few hours of HR sexual harassment and cybersecurity training, how to set up my 401k and medical benefits, etc. etc. Basically, nothing to do with "computer science" which is what the original post was about.
Interpreting and displaying those DCC'ed files or cutting longer messages into sub messages and recombining them is something that you could implement via the IRC client just as easily as it was implemented in Slack (not to say that it would be easy, it'd be a lot of work, but it likely would not be much more work than what took to make that function in slack).
If you're modifying IRC anyway, you can modify the server to record logs and make those available to clients.
Same goes for editing.
IRC is not as bad as you think it is, and it wouldn't be an insurmountable effort to make it as good as slack, but open sourced rather than proprietary, which was the entire point of the original article.