I started making a Mastodon bot over the weekend, although I’m not super excited about it. Mostly this is because, from a technical perspective, it’s not new ground for me. The bot is text-based, and uses Python and SpaCy to work with text drawn from the Wikipedia API. I’ve done this before, so I’m not terribly enthused.

But I want to spend more time programming, so I stayed up late working on it. Frankly, I am finding it a challenge to stick with Python these days, since a bunch of the current excitement surrounding the language is around machine learning, and I am decidedly *not* interested in that, from either a technical or a social perspective.

Is this why people turn to new languages? To find a different emphasis, or maybe some different buzzy topics to work on? I didn’t realize how much I was relying on the popular Python topic du jour for motivation until all of a sudden it diverged from my interests and left me mostly adrift. I will have to reorient, and reground my programming practice in something new.

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