I didn't know there was a more elegant way to do the shebang. I've fixed that now. It hadn't occurred to me that there was a particular advantage to being able to reload without restarting, but I am considering that now.
Personally, I prefer using libraries to reinventing the wheel. YMMV.
For me, that depends on the size of the library and how much I am using it. I really don't need a library to handle the logic of connecting to a server and sending things as simple as IRC messages. This is not something that I really expect to use outside the context of a bot. However, if there were a good library for creating a flexible bot (which would thus include the small low-level IRC stuff) then I would be interested. But investigating what was out there for creating IRC bots in Python, I really wasn't impressed. Most every bot framework is designed for sitting in one channel and listening for specific commands or command prefixes. Nothing wrong with that, but that only covers one sort of IRC bot.
I didn't know there was a more elegant way to do the shebang. I've fixed that now. It hadn't occurred to me that there was a particular advantage to being able to reload without restarting, but I am considering that now.
Personally, I prefer using libraries to reinventing the wheel. YMMV.