Background

Why, oh, why!

tl;dr: because I needed it.

Now with the actual reason...

Yes, yes, yes, I know. “Yet another IRC Bot”... But why oh why oh why did you need to make a new one? There are tons of them: SupyBot Phenny, and the super-hyper Hubot... Here’s the deal, right? There are a lot of bots, but all of them suck at one thing: remembering. Usually, these bots only know how to perform small tasks that only require a ping and a pong back with the answer. After doing this task, your question and its answer are gone, and the bot forgets about it.

Here was my challenge: I wanted to hack a bot that could handle a small IRC- based game, with several players, a subset of rules, dice rolling, keeping scores during the game, and a winner when the score of a player was reaching the goal. To do that, your bot needs a brain.

The case of Hubot

I’ve been tempted to build it using Hubot, and its Hubot-irc adapter. But I’ve lost three full evenings trying to make it work, without success. My bug report lead to solve it. It might change in the future, but my node-js skills are close to zero, and my Javascript is a bit above this level.

I needed to succeed. Building a “dumb” IRC bot is quite easy. There are tons of examples you can find on the web. You can extend these bots by adding a plugin system, like Supybot’s or phenny’s. But that’s not good for my use, because it “only” consists of an ephemereal callback function. I needed a “smarter” bot.

Introducing CmdBot

Here is my take. It’s far from being 100% perfect, but I think it takes the best of Python’s introspection mechanism.

By the way, why the name “CmdBot”? Because its function loading system has been inspired by the Python’s cmd module, that uses class member introspection to catch the designated functions and execute them.

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