You know, I was tempted to write that to begin like as I'm a fan of irc over slack for non-work chat, but for the same reason I prefer slack for work - it's sufficiently different.

As much as we can all agree that IRC-likes, and even IRC's predecessors are wonderful and responsible for much of the progress we have today, I think we can also fairly say not every chat application from now unto forever is an IRC-like.

I would (and I think fairly) catagorise a set of slack-likes and IRC-likes differently, with matrix occupying a grey area inbetween.