Well, yea....
But I personally hate scripting languages like that. And as far as hogging resources, the user would have to install the runtime for things like Perl. (Have you ever seen how big the perl runtime for Win32 is? its around 50-100 mb with all the modules installed.) That would be bad enough for a user to install. Also, those are really slow (not good for sending game packets thru a network... the game would crawl at a snail's pace using scripting like that), and in the case of stuff like Java it may require special permissions to access sockets.
Even if you did use a multiplatform system, it could be firewalled by schools, libraries, etc. IRC can be firewalled too, but the clients support proxies (bypassing the firewall).
Also, transporting game data thru IRC is very clunky. IRC is a text only mechanism, which would mean binary data would have to continually be base64 encoded and decoded, which would waste a lot of time.
And as far as people not understanding how TCP/IP works, it only takes about 2 minutes to explain it enough that they can join a game.
I think writing programs like this is a waste of time. Why not just use what is already in place?
