Re: [infobot] Re: infobot mailing lists

[David C. <da...@ca...>]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2004 at 02:37:30PM +0200, Jonathan Hitchcock wrote:
> > >Is Perl the way the bot should go?  Is it the best choice?  Why?

I'd say yes, and yes.  As for why - well, it's already written in perl,
and I expect that most people who have hacked on it are familiar with
perl, more than they are with (eg) Java or Python.

If you want to write a *new* bot, then by all means use some other
language, but it will be new project and a new bot.  I will also most
likely not be interested.  Partly because I'm most familiar with perl,
partly because I have no other need to install java or python and I
won't install them for something as trivial as an IRC bot.  I pay for my
disk space, and have an uncomfortably small amount of free space, but I
need perl for other stuff anyway.

> > >specific choice of language a good way to go?  In today's multi-lingua
> > >world, should we stick to one language, or have a source-independent
> > >API, communicating with RPC or PB or SOAP?

Ugh.  That reeks of suit-inspired over-engineering.

> > One way NOT to go is C# or any other single-platform language/language
> > variant.  So that pretty much limits you to Perl, Java, C and C++.

C# was multi-platform, I thought, if you use mono.  I even hear that
it's quite a nice language.

> I was heading towards Python with my question ;-)
> 
> Python is platform independent, wonderfully structured, easy to code in,
> and has lots of beautiful modules that make stuff easy.

All of that applies to perl.  Well, maybe not the wonderfully
structured.  I've not looked at the sources for python so have no idea
how wonderful its guts are.  But it's easy to write portable, well
structured code in perl, and unlike python, perl has CPAN.

> And Python/Twisted (http://www.twistedmatrix.com/) makes programming
> network applications ridiculously simple.

As do POE, SOAP, and the socket stuff in perl.

> Again, Perspective Broker has all the advantages and none of the
> disadvantages.

I don't believe that for one moment.

>                I just think it might be useful for different bots to
> communicate with each other ...

Bots can already communicate with each other, in private messages.
Infobots do it.

-- 
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence

  God not only plays with dice, he sometimes
  throws them where they can't be seen
     -- Stephen Hawking