Toast

So I said I was going to write about Toast "tomorrow", over a week ago. Well, what can I say, I've been busy with actually writing the thing. We're talking OCD-level, every-evening-until-1-AM coding.

First, a short recap of my last post: IF (currently) sucks, and one of the ways to fix it is to put it online with Jabber bots.

This post is mostly about that last.

Naming the thing was unexpectedly hard. There was a period where I was calling it "Vox" until I decided that fun-and-nonthreatening was the way to go, so Toast. There will be a companion program, Jelly, that will act as a sort of server piece for Jabber. Toast is architected so that you can have Toast programs ("responders") talk to almost anything. It comes out of the box with a console runner for testing.

Toast (and thus all bots written in Toast) is written in Ruby. Ruby has grown on me. There are warts, but it lets you be more terse than in any language I've seen yet, including Lisp. And it has batteries that Lisp doesn't, like a real object system built in.

( More, with a bit of code )

( Where to acquire? )

( Future plans )