Yesterday, the Munich Perl Mongers were guests of the Munich chapter of the System Administrators Guild Europe. This invitation was much to the relief of Harald Jörg. He got a break from the tedious task of determining the number of attendees, needed for restaurant reservations. An amazing number of about 20 SAGEs and 10 Mongers turned up.
The topic was 'GUI in Perl', and we even had presentations. Steffen Ulrich talked about his experiences with an homegrown competitor of SAP, written in Perl/Tk. He also did comparisons with other GUI toolkits. Tk seems to have the best impedance match with Perl, but is also the worst looking GUI toolkit.
Harald showed us a Perl/Tk project he had resurected after 8 years of banishment. He did a 3D-Designer for houses and furniture. It was jolly fun flying thru walls, all without VRML. No Doom monsters were to be seen anywhere.
Stephen Riem tooks us on tour of the darker sides of Programming, by showing a Java application for the planning of television commercials. The number of lines of code was truly frightening.
Huh, I find Tk truly awful to work with. Try as I might, I could never get my scripts to look anything but horribly messy when using it.
In contrast, Gtk2-Perl is a joy all around. It feels very Perlish, all over, and the code is clean and obvious.
