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Have you ever tried to program using the perl bindings? I have done it in the past and was extremely annoyed by the fact that it is a non-stop moving target. It also broke quite often. I ended up abandoning the entire stuff.

Yup, sure have. I've been working with this app for going on three years, producing useful releases every 4-5 months or so, and haven't run across a "moving target" in Perl/Tk. Aside from bugfixes, I haven't had to go back and change any of my code or work around any brokenness in new Perl/Tk releases.

Granted, my app doesn't tax the outer limits of the Tk bindings, but for what I do, I've found Perl/Tk to be a stable and adequate cross-platform toolkit.

For me, it came down to documentation. I have a moderately complicated GUI Perl app (Perl because it was the language I was most familiar with). I looked into various toolkits, like wxPerl, GTK/Perl, QT/Perl, but ended up using good ol' reliable Perl/Tk.

The big advantage with picking up Perl/Tk was that the O'Reilly books were extremely informative - good examples on each widget, how they interoperate, how to use them, and larger program examples. The documentation for the other toolkits I considered basically consisted of "look at the arguments this C++ function takes, and use it," which didn't make for an easy time picking things up (wxPerl was the worst in that regard). While an experienced C++ programmer might not have a hard time with that, it was way over my head.

As a result, though, I have a decent app that runs on X11 and Win32. With the great PAR archiver, I can even package the app up in a nice bundle.

Good times.

I perform improvisational comedy when I'm not geeking out. Though it edges toward the geeky side with the software I wrote for the audio stuff.

I agree - I was able to build a very functional GUI app in Perl/Tk after going through the book "Learning Perl/Tk".

As a bonus, the code runs under both X and Win32, which means some non-Linux folks have been able to use it with just a few checks of $^O. It's been great. I looked into WxWindows a few months ago, but the documentation was nowhere near as complete as Perl/Tk's is.

It's not DJ'ing in the strictest sense of the word, but I switched the sound system at the improv comedy club I'm a part of over from tapes and CDs to an MP3/OGG based system about a year ago to good results.

Under the tape and CD system, it took a significant amount of time to find the music selection that you needed. Even if the tapes and CDs were well-organized, it could take 20-30 seconds to find the right audio clip, where you'd need to be able to get it in 3-4 seconds to hit "the moment." Plus, especially with the tapes, you'd always have to worry if the person in front of you had rewound it to the right spot.

So I converted most of the common clips to MP3, wrote a Perl/Tk frontend running with XMMS, MySQL, and Linux to allow for quick searches, and put it into production. The results have been great - the people running the audio can get to their samples incredibly fast, and it really impresses the audience.

So a digital audio solution worked wonders for us, even though we're not the traditional "DJ".