About history: of course you can run your own IRC bouncer if you're willing to host it, but irccloud https://www.irccloud.com/ is such a no-brain solution that more and more IRC users have it.
i'm a user... aware of irccloud since the extended beta, but recently a user due to various nesc. evils of corporate networking. except honestly the ui sucks for history and non existent search sucks compared to botbot.me ie. https://botbot.me/freenode/google-containers/
erlang vs python .. connected clients vs historical search.. apples and oranges i guess...
