My first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years after the last release.

Mine were mIRC scripts for banning spammers. Eventually we had a community of people writing bots in perl, PHP, and loads of other languages. I was introduced to Unix by means of wanting to run irssi in screen so I could collect messages even when I was offkyine. It is no exaggeration to say IRC is completely responsible for my career, far more so than education!

Another option is to try cygwin [1] as it has a weechat build [2]. Weechat also runs under WSL [3].

[1] https://cygwin.com/

[2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html

[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

Seems like you can run it under Windows Subsystem for Linux.