This post is a sort of a rant, so excuse me in advance.

Lately, I feel that Perl is losing momentum against the other dynamic languages, and especially Ruby. This means that much less newbies are coming to the languages, that much less new developments use it and that people are reluctant to integrate it with different interesting packages.

A good example is GUIs. I'm a long time Perl/Tk user, but I really want to move forward. Tk just doesn't look good on Windows PCs these days, and good looks sell. When I want to brag to the bosses about a shiny new GUI I made for one of the programs, I feel embarrased showing Tk, when other people use native C# GUIs and LabView.

I tried using wxPerl a couple of years ago - the looks are much better (at the expense of performance...) but the library is poorly documented, and the bindings are incomplete. Today I tried looking at wxPerl again, and to my surprise it hardly advanced at all!!

wxRuby, on the other hand, seems to be production quality. Binary distributions for Windows, detailed documentation for the API (not "look at the C++ wxWindows API"), tutorials, and so on. This is not surprising in light of Perl's obvious loss of momentum versus Ruby.

This is pity. It's all I have to say. Once Perl used to be at the front, but now you have to resort to other tools. I hope Perl 6 will bring the lead back.