Perl: March 2007 Archives

As if I don't have enough going on my head for side projects, I've been playing with Perl 6 a lot recently. I'm really getting a craving to write a Perl 6 IDE -- something with the kind of integration that EPIC on Eclipse or ActiveState Komodo simply can't offer.

The thing that fries me about most of these IDEs is that Perl comes in last. Very little command completion, half braindead debugging systems, while other languages seem to work great. Some of it lies with Perl, as the TMTOWTDI makes writing an IDE really difficult. Maybe Perl 6 can really help with that.

Incidentally, despite my love affair with Komodo, I elected not to upgrade to 4.0. TextMate is serving my needs for now with system tools and Catalyst development, but I occasionally long for the debugger and RegEx Toolkit.

Forgive my long absence, been so busy with work and other projects that I haven't really taken the time to update. I really need to find a better way to remedy that.

For now, though, the homegrown project of 'gheibot' has, erm, "matured" into whatbot. Designed as our IRC channel's replacement for infobot, we're looking to expand its appeal and get a few more eyes on it as it actually starts working. It's currently written in OO perl5, on top of Net::IRC, and communicates with SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. Designed to be rather IO and database agnostic, in theory, it can be adapted to protocols such as AIM, or other databases such as BDB or Microsoft SQL Server.

As of right now, there is a basic extension system, and attempts to duplicate the basic learning and karma capabilities of infobot. Needless to say, it has a while to go.