My use of Perl is in a more traditional: information processing and management, generally without any GUI interface. My experiences with GUI building have led me to believe that I'm not cut out for that kind of work, except perhaps, the occasional CGI-type interface. Tk and I don't get along. I've tried several (Perl | Tcl)/Tk projects and ended up finding another way to develop the GUI.

As a clarification of what I consider "information processing," I include the searching, indexing, formatting, restructering of both textual and binary data. The later is usually considered data processing, but I have an unfortunate association of that term with COBOL. The processing of binary data may seem more appropriate to C++, but Perl has no bias toward just processing ASCII text; regular expressions can work very well on binary stuff, after all, they work on international text. Minimizing development time is more important to me than minimizing run time. If there are sections that are REALLY slow, and they are good Perl, they can, with some little effort, be rewritten in C++ and made into a runtime loadable library.

My platform of choice is *nix, mainly because that is what I grew up with. I do work in the Window environment, but primarily for running applications that one can find only there, and which typically are heavy on graphics. For developing, I still haven't found anything better than the *nix environment, editors, tools, shells, etc. None-the-less, I am always looking for better ways of using my Windows machines. Cygwin has been a great help in bridging the gap, as has ActiveState's Windows products. But, Linux isn't going to fade away any time soon. As long as it or something derived from the same roots is around, I'll be using it.