If I wanted to build a slack bot with a future of coding technology, what alternatives do I have? I want to build a bot that when someone posts in this slack in some channels the bot will be notified, will check if it has details about that user (mostly a link to some place on the web where people can find out more about them), if it has details or already contacted that user then it does nothing if the user is new and wasn't contacted then it sends a DM to the user asking to provide a public url to use to link to on the newsletter or just ignore the message. What's your FoC stack? 🙂

How do slack bots work? Are they just a server you run that receives webhook calls from Slack?

from what I've seen yes, they are webhook handlers and make http requests to do things back to slack

Is Erlang the ideal stack for servers?

the ideal stack is a one block "stack" running in the ether (and I don't have to manage the ether)

Dark was by far the easiest experience for me in building Slack Bots, the instant feedback, instant deploy, and good-enough storage/JSON manipulation facilities made it the fastest dev loop for things like slack bots

+1 Dark for the FoC features - canvas editor, create datastore/HTTP route with a couple clicks, and trace-driven development

Zapier + spreadsheet

@Konrad Hinsen Question after reading https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CLYCGTCPL/p1620022442009200?thread_ts=1617934373.001800&cid=CLYCGTCPL: how feasible/easy is it to build a Slack bot in Smalltalk?

@Kartik Agaram No idea, because I don't know what it takes to make a Slack bot. The HTTP support in Pharo is very good, both client and server side. There are higher-level frameworks for Web stuff as well, and many people work in that space, but not me.

We built one in Clojure. It was not difficult.