It should be possible to program in perl more quickly, though if you have a specific goal that needs lightning speed say for animation then C++ may be better. Also there is more Wx code and contributed libraries that have not yet been perl wrapped, so you still could look at that framework if you are using C++.

The merits of perl over other languages are better covered elsewhere. Though being a bit more secure against buffer overflows, and being quicker to prototype, are two. If you can write your time dependent code as a library useable from Perl you can contribute to the community as well. C++ not C# please! Actually if you work on a perl GUI project you will get more chicks too!

Personally I find it worth putting extra time into getting a perl gui environment working on windows even though I've programmed a large C application (ported a printing app like quark express from MacOS) for windows. Did I mention I absolutely love Perl and absolutely hate programming the Windows interface?

Some more reasons.. you can use CPAN and put code that was in a CGI into a client app. You can use PAR and download modules on the fly. You can glue together other languages and embed C++. Preprepared facilities like hashes and regexes, dynamic typing, DWIM-like grammar, Perl 6 roadmap, etc.

I have other reasons but they are part of my competitive edge!

That said, being the quintissential lazy perl programmer I would prefer an even easier way to to do it. With perl I have some faith that will come in time. Somehow I feel flavor of the month C# was not intended for the same thing.

Oh, last reason not to use C# is Steve Ballmer's tantrum where he threatens the Google CEO with murder (story on slashdot.org today). I don't think I want to trust my code to that kind of a company.