Sounds like you want to find an IRC channel that's close to your areas of interest. Perl has irc.perl.org with lots of channels. I'm sure there's something akin

Sounds like you want to find an IRC channel that's close to your areas of interest. Perl has irc.perl.org with lots of channels. I'm sure there's something akin to that for most large programming communities. Searching the channel list on Freenet might be a good start.