Sometimes you need an excuse to learn a new programing language. For me, that language is Python and that excuse is creating a ‘bot’ for Twitter. I won’t talk about what the bot does yet, since it’s only about 40% done at this point, but I thought the experience of learning how to create it was valuable and worth sharing.
Why Python? Well Google, xkcd, and Mark Pilgrim seem to like it. For me, that’s actually good enough right there. And why Twitter? My good friends Shawn Smith and Mike Lambie think it’s a pretty cool service and will probably keep growing. So I figure it’s worth learning the Twitter APIs.