Although Hubot is fun, and is already in use for gluing development chatrooms to infrastructure of all sorts at companies like GitHub, there are alternatives. I've had a couple of conversations with Guillaume BINET whose Err chatbot might be the sort of alternative you might consider.

Err (pronounced 'R2') is written in Python, is extensible through plugins which look reasonably easy to write, and has a catalog of pre-existing plugins. If you'd rather use Python than node.js to extend your chatbot, Err might be a good choice for you.

I haven't tried it yet -- there are two blocking issues for me:

• XMPP-only: I currently use CampFire, because I like the available clients and the native support for history/searching.
• No Web Hooks / Notifications: Err is mostly built for responding to user requests in the chatroom. I often use Hubot to respond to external services, like an SVN checkin or CI build notification. You could presumably write this into Err yourself, but it doesn't make that easy for you yet.

These may come soon so if you're interested in Err, you could star or watch the project on GitHub and keep an eye on it.