As a long-time IRC fan/user/developer-of-chatbots, I wouldn't entirely mind if things transitioned to a proper successor. (The advantage of IRC is that it's extremely easy to work with/implement on a basic level. The disadvantage is edge cases and things like NickServ which, while not official, might as well be.)

Slack seems well-positioned for this, but I'm still somewhat rooting for something more like Matrix ( http://matrix.org/ ), because that's an open protocol.